Traditional Specialities Guaranteed (1986 vintage) TSG

Traditional Specialities Guaranteed (1986 vintage) TSG Tenuta San Guido (TSG) also happens to be the birth place and home, still, to the great Vino da Tavola, Sassicaia!

Of the many wines that have been opened & enjoyed, already this year, I would like to mention the 1986 Sassicaia from of course Tenuta San Guido, on the west coast of Tuscany. 1986 was never considered a particularly good vintage for Sassicaia, especially since this wine was going to be in the shadow of the great 1985 vintage. But I have to let you know that we tried a bottle of 1986 last night and it has developed ‘magnificently’. A very fine, elegant, in the best sense, slender,  a distinguished wine with very good minerality and fine herbal tones to it, that clearly shows why Sassicaia is also called, somewhere?, the Lafite Rothschild of Italy. It really showed only a bit of age after these 30 odd years, and should indeed have a good future. It was a great bottle!

Sassicaia, the epitome of a great super-Tuscan. What began as a self-consumption project in the late 1960s has now become a vinous cult. Hardly any other Italian wine has managed to convey the best qualities of a large Bordeaux so precisely in the glass. Here, the purity of the aged Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc grapes come together in an elegance and complexity as befits a great wine. This Sassicaia’86 showed off dense and lush fruit and also a certain amount of grandeur and balance. It does not have to be the, now legendary, 1985 to realize that Sassicaia is among one the great wines of this world. We will try out the 1988 vintage next month, and let you know okay.

Grape Variety:    85% Cabernet Sauvignon & 15% Cabernet Franc (24 months in 100% new ‘French’ oak barrels)

A footnote:  In stock we have a case each of 1985 Sassicaia in magnum format and 75cl bottles. Six of each 100pts legend!