The Iron Chevsky Wine Blog

This year's Tre Bicchieri event in San Francisco continued the string of exciting annual tastings organized by the prestigious Gambero Rosso Italian food and wine magazine. I am proud to have been covering this event for many years now, as it is the top Italian wine tasting event of the year in the Bay Area. 415 wines made it into the "2014 Best Italian Wines" list out of tens of thousands sampled from across the prodigious land of Italy in the past year. For more details about Tre Bicchieri process and winners, see here  (html) and here (pdf). Most of the cult names were awarded, but not present at the tasting this time. In general, the amount and variety of wines poured per winery was the lowest I had seen. The explanation I got was that producers are no longer allowed to take any left-over wine out of the building, so many were quite conservative in how much they brought in, and quite a few ran out of wine well before the end of the tasting. 2009 Barolos on displa

Frederick Wildman's portfolio tasting was my first dip into the 2012 vintage in Burgundy. I had heard that it was a difficult, low-yielding year that resulted in inconsistent wines, where the best boasted beautiful concentration and exceeded the quality of the 2011 vintage. After tasting through several world-class producers, my impression is that the reds are ripe, plump, pliant, with soft ripe tannins, appearing to have lower acidity than the generally energetic 2010's and the lighter 2011's. I think the acidity and structure are there, but presently masked by generous fruit. It should be noted that most of the reds are still in barrel for another 2-3 months, and will then spend another 6-12 months in bottle before release to markets throughout the world. We should expect them to hit US retail in 2015. Domaine Armand Rousseau Not suprisingly, Domaine Armand Rousseau drew a lot of attention. The Gevrey-Chambertin (village), Lavaux St.-Jacques 1er, monopole Ruchottes-