Friday, July 3, 2015

July Wine of the Month

Our wine feature for July comes to us from the island of Sardinia. Sardinia (which belongs to Italy) is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea and lies roughly 190 miles west of Italy's mainland. In recent years, researchers including Dan Buettner and National Geographic have identified Sardinia as a “Blue Zone."  Blue zone areas are places where people reach the age of 100 at rates 10 times greater than in the United States.

Within the Blue Zones, researchers have identified nine specific characteristics that they believe contribute to a long healthy life. One of the characteristics in Sardinians is drinking a glass or two of their island made Cannonau wine daily. The Cannonau grape (known in other parts of the world as Grenache) contains two to three times the level of artery scrubbing flavonoids as other wines and may be a contributing factor to their long life.


Our feature wine, Costera, is from the Argiolas estate owned by Franco and Giuseppe Argiolas. The vineyard is located in the Trexenta hills just north of the capital of Cagliari. The wine spends 8 – 10 months in French Barriques and 5 months in cement vats. Costera shows the typicality of the Cannonau (grenache) grape with flavors of very ripe strawberries, black cherries, herbs, and spices. The warmth and intense sunlight of southern Sardinia can be seen and felt in the wine with unexpectedly deep color and fullness on the palate. French oak barriques provide rounded tannins, medium body and flavors of vanilla.  



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