Antinori Tignanello 2018

Drink now or cellar for up to 20 years. . Decant for 1 hours prior to serving

Tignanello, one of the Antinori Families flagship wines, is only produced in the best vintages, from the Tignanello vineyard high in the hills of Chianti Classico. With an opaque ruby color and purple highlights on the rim, Tignanello shows aromas of black currant, rose petal, leather, and kirsch. The dense, firm palate has flavors of red cherry, earth, iron, and tobacco, with silky tannins and a fresh finish.

Sangiovese or Cabernet based wines beg for red meat, with their ability to be both rich and tannic and fresh at the same time. This wine, a blend of both, clearly calls for a big steak, preferably a Bisteca Fiorentina drizzled with newly pressed extra virgin olive oil from the Chianti region.

Tignanello is a legendary wine, with many firsts to its name: the first Italian Sangiovese based wine that was aged in new French oak barriques, the first Tuscan red wine to use non-indigenous international varietals, and one of the first wines from the Chianti Classico region to be produced without using the classic, but largely looked down upon technique of blending white wine into red wines for freshness. It was also one of the first in a line of many wines called the Super Tuscans: wines that initially, when they were introduced in the 1970’s, legally had to be called table wines due to their flouting of Italian convention and law by their use of international grape varieties and not indigenous ones. They are now some of the most highly rated and well-regarded wines in the world, leading the way for the new Italian wine mindset.