Rare wines: the new weekly guide by Gambero Rosso

What is a rare wine? First of all, a hard-to-find product produced in limited quantities, endowed with some unique and uncommon characters. Rarity can be connected to the number of bottles, but also to its peculiarity. Rare wines are fascinating because they take risks and are stylistically detached. They are often the result of the desire to raise the bar and go beyond the limits, to experiment and innovate on one hand, and to resume past practices on the other hand. What matters the most here? Maintaining contact and human dimensions. We are convinced that in a period of great confusion, but also of lively debate in the world of wine, artisanal wines should have a dedicated space. They have a special bond with the territory and with the ones who interpret it. Because they are often starting or landing points for wine lovers, who, just like us, look for something different in the glass, for unpredictability and surprise.

For this guide, we set a benchmark of 3,000 bottles for each wine, with some rare exceptions including an additional 20% for wines produced in some very peculiar contexts, such as remote islands or particularly extreme places. Curiosity will drive us through this journey, which will bring together small artisans, vignerons, garagistes, as well as top-notch selections created by solid companies that produce a handful of bottles among a wide and full range. In our column, we will put into dialogue and compare two wines each time. We are not fans but crazy lovers of this world. We will go in search of the good and the beauty without prejudices, we will go in search of little-known varieties and plots of land that reach towards the sky. We will focus again on now-forgotten meditation wines, we will be touched by cuvées that feel the soul of the territory. In our tech sheets we will always start from the vineyard, since it comes first. We will then introduce the producer and taste the product, followed by our notes, all told in a more dialectical and narrative language. We want to take you on a journey through these bottles, thus bringing back the taste of discovery. Our evaluations will be based on a centesimal scale after an in-depth research work. These wines will be exclusively included in our column and will therefore not be available in other publications of ours. We just wish you a good journey.

www.gamberorossointernational.com/wines/rare-wines

 by Lorenzo Ruggeri & Giuseppe Carrus

Illustration of Gaia Guarino