the blind tasting, Brunello or not?
On December 10th we hosted the Brunello blind tasting at viniventisei.it . we prepared 9 different wines for the tasting, including 5 Brunellos and 4 Sangiovese taste like Brunello, but the most expensive Brunello is bit corked, so we end up with 8 different wines (but there were 15 bottles because we have 17 guests )
The wines were served blind folded and the participants had to guess whether each wine was a brunello or not. If they get all the answers right, they can come to our next tasting for free and the guest they bring will enjoy a 50% discount on the original price. And if they made only one mistake, they will enjoy a 50% discount on the original price of our next tasting and the guests they bring also will have the same discount.
In the end there are 2 participants who made only one mistake and they are coming to our tasting-Viognier of Italy and the world on 23rd december with 2 extra guests.
To be honest the blind tasting is very challenging, because all the 9 wines are quality sangiovese from Tuscany and Umbria~I will not get all the answers right if I don’t know the answer already.
It is only because Brunello has a name, maybe still not very much famous but at least if some foreigner knows 10 names of Italian wine, Brunello will be one of them.
By the way, the price of brunello rose a lot recently. I remember we had a bottle of brunello for 28 euro in a restaurant in 2017, and in 2023 it cost 50 euro/bottle in the wineries on average.
And the bottle 八(otto rosso) from our co-host viniventisei.it was voted 6 times as brunello which make sense because it is made of the exact same kind of “clone” of sangiovese just as brunello.
I tried to write a thorough tasting note on the 9 wines in the blind tasting but i couldn’t, because ventisei brought another 15 bottles of their own wines, so 21 people drank 30 bottles on that day.
We were all drunk.