One of the difficult things about loving wine is knowing that it is a diminishing commodity. It will eventually all get consumed or go bad with age; there just is no other fate. But for every wine that disappears from existence, at least one more takes its place so when I discover something new I get very excited. It dulls the pain of no longer being able to find wines I have come to cherish.

I have no idea how this happened. I know I need to brush-up on my Italians (come on, you’re not really going to laugh about that are you?) and recently was looking to buy ready to drink Tuscany, Brunello di Montalcino, Barolo and Babaresco. I consider them amongst the best and their mature versions are certainly rapidly diminishing commodities. Somehow I stumbled upon this Sicilian wine: Nero d’Avola Morgante 2006 that James Suckling at Wine Spectator awarded 90 points. 90 points (WS or Tanzer) is my low cutoff point because anything less than that is rarely going to be good for me.

I ordered a couple of bottles not knowing anything about it except it had a glowing review. The description sounded great but still I did not have very high expectations. Regardless, learning wine is a lifelong endeavor and drinking wine whether good or bad is always a valuable experience. I had to do some research to even know what grape variety would be found in this bottle. The grape it turns out is Nero and is indigenous to Sicily. Nero means “black” and the d’Avola part translates into “of Avola” which is the small town in the southeastern part of the island where Morgante is. Thus, “black of Avola”. Way, way below my personal radar was this wine or even the varietal. I just have never heard of this before.

As soon as I put my nose into the glass I knew this was going to be one of those special, great finds. Oh, oh, oh! It’s not uncommon for Italian wines to be very perfumed but this was just exquisite and superbly crafted vino. Along with its incredible aroma that continued to evolve in my glass, this wine had a spectacular flavor, full-bodied and very balanced in terms of fruit, tannins, alcohol and acidity. The finish was very long and excellent with multi-layers of different fruits unfolding on the palate with slight tar notes (often associated with Italian wines and is a good thing, not a bad thing).

The thing about Italy is that it is old with an extremely long history of everything, including winemaking. Experts estimate there are at the very least, hundreds if not thousands of grape varietals growing wild in Italy and surrounds that are not even discovered, known or classified yet. Keep in mind that spontaneous mutation can and does happen over long periods of time so it makes sense to me that a country like Italy and the region would have all sorts of interesting grape varieties pop up over thousands of years. Another fact that amazed me was the huge number of acres under vine in Sicily: 275,000 +.

I ordered more right away and the only reason I’m mentioning this wine at all is that there’s enough to go around to all three or four of you that read this blog (and you should be rewarded for that). Morgante made 25,000 cases and believe me, now I’ll be looking out for more of these beauties. I feel confident in saying that part of the delicious effort of this wine is due to the fact that there probably is little intervention, meaning that the winemaker probably does not have a lot of high-tech tools to manipulate his wares. This translates into very pure fruit, which the WS review also mentioned – purity of fruit. As if you need just one more reason to seek out this really marvelous wine, you can buy it for $13 a bottle. This is a wine to be savored over the course of time in your glass - thank me later.