Tag Archives: Pio Boffa

Expensive wine 144: Pio Cesare Cortese di Gavi 2018

Pio Cesare Cortese di Gavi 2018
Pio Cesare Cortese di Gavi 2018/$19-$25

The Pio Cesare Cortese di Gavi is a reminder that great wine doesn’t have to be ridiculously expensive

The last time I reviewed this wine it cost one-third less and was a wine of the week. Nevertheless, it was a value then and it remains a value today.

That’s because quality wines made by a top-notch producer may cost more than they used to. But they still deliver value when too many other wines cost more for no reason other than they should. The Pio Cesare Cortese di Gavi ($22, purchased, 13.5%) is firmly of the first category.

It’s an Italian white made with the less-known cortese grape. This vintage, though already three years old, could use a little more time in the bottle to come together. Still, it’s well worth drinking, and especially well worth buying for a Mother’s Day brunch next week.

Look for green herbs, barely ripe pear fruit, and even the kind of grassiness usually found in traditional California sauvignon blanc. Plus, it’s wonderfully flinty and almost savory in a way certain Italian white wines can be when they don’t try to be something other than Italian white wines.

Highly recommended. It’s the kind of wine the late Pia Boffa would have tasted with a wine writer and then expounded on, telling the writer why it’s the best example of its kind of wine possible.

And he might have been right.

Imported by Maisons Marques & Domaines USA

Winebits 694: Wine packaging, convenience store wine, Pio Boffa

Shopper
“So why do crackers have ingredient labels, but wine doesn’t?”

This week’s wine news: Another of the Winestream Media calls for wine packaging changes, plus more good news for convenience store wine and Italy’s Pio Boffa dies

• Welcome aboard: Sean Sullivan, the founder of the Washington Wine Report who also writes for the Wine Enthusiast, says what blog readers have known for years: U.S. wine is a mess, and his solutions include ingredient labels, accurate alcohol levels, lighter bottles, and using more screwcaps. And yes, I had a Fred Sanford moment when I read this. That someone as respected as Sullivan would write this speaks directly to the problems facing the wine business these days, and that he would suggest steps that someone generally seen as a crank has advocated for years speaks even more directly to the problem. Wine is fun. Why can’t we make it more accessible?

• C-stores, baby: Forgive the cliché, but every time the Wine Curmudgeon sees a study touting convenience store wine sales – or C-stores, as they’re known in the trade – I get much too excited. The latest report comes from market research firm IRI. Its numbers: Dollar sales of table wine were up 7.9 percent while case sales for wine increased 5.5 percent in 2020. One of the big sellers, says the story in the link, was and will be rose – which tends to suggest that younger consumers are doing much of the wine buying at convenience stores. Baby Boomers still tend to think of them as places to buy diapers in the middle of the night and bad coffee at 7 in the morning on the way to work.

• Pio Boffa: One of my favorite wine experiences was in 2012, when I had lunch with Pio Boffa of Pio Cesare, one of Italy’s top producers. The highlight was the 2007 Cesare Barbaresco, one of the two or three greatest wines I’ve ever tasted. Sadly, and you don’t need to know Italian to read this, Boffa died last week at the age of 66: “Il Covid si è portato via un altro grande del mondo del vino.” Grand old man, indeed. As The Italian Wine Guy noted: “And what a wonderfully complicated and all too brief life it was. … And he was among a handful of men and women in Italy who moved the needle and gained Italian wine its due and acceptance on the world’s stage.”

Photo: “Shopper” by Thad Zajdowicz is licensed under CC BY 2.0