2004 Castellare Chianti Classico: file this under “whoops”

Castellare, Chianti, Italian wine, Low scoring wines, whoops

We’ve had the 2004 Castellare Chianti Classico on our minds ever since tasting it at the Winebow trade tasting of their Italian portfolio. We were impressed by the wine, as was our tasting partner for the day. You can read our write-up here, and our tasting partner’s here.

Finally, last week, we got it in stock and went to enter it into inventory this weekend. As a matter of course, we decided to look up the scores in the wine trades. Yes, we actually buy wine because we like it, before we’ve even checked out the Speculator and such. And perhaps that’s a good thing, because who knows if we would have brought it in had we seen the 78 points it received from the Wine Spectator’s James Suckling, with the following notes:

“Lean and vegetal, with some fruit. Bitter. Tasted four times, with consistent notes. Tasted twice, with consistent notes.”

We’re not even sure what this means. Did Suckling taste it two times, or four times? Or did he taste it two plus four times? The 2004 doesn’t appear to have been scored by the Wine Advocate, though recent vintages have scored consistently in the mid to high 80s (interesting to see that in consideration of our Spanish tasting last year that revealed similar gaps between WS and WA scores for that country as well).

Whatever the case, we can say the following: we tasted the 2004 Castellare Chianti Classico once, with consistent notes. The wine, to us, is a fine representation of Sangiovese. It’s full of sour cherry, and tastes correct for the region. It’s decidedly Italian, and not in a newfangled Super-Tuscan kind of way, but showing the dirty, truffled, wild boar and slightly acidic biting elements we associate with the terroir. This is not at all a hard wine to drink, but it never lets you forget you’re drinking it — and we mean that in a very good way.

We’ll probably have a tough time selling this wine now, just based on the score — that is, unless you decide to trust a wine retailer’s judgment over a wine magazine’s in making your purchase. We’re not sure we’ve reached that level of trust with most of you yet, but that won’t stop us from stocking the 78-pointers that we feel deserve a place on our shelves. After all, if worse comes to worst and it doesn’t sell, we can always drink the Castellare Chianti ourselves, and we’ll enjoy it immensely.

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