Wines of the Week: Edouard Duval & Vallone

Edouard Duval NV Champagne Le Noir d’Eulalie Blanc de Noirs Extra Brut         93

The Edouard Duval NV Champagne Le Noir d’Eulalie Blanc de Noirs Extra Brut released recently strikes me as the best Champagne in Dival’s exciting lineup of bubblies. Pale yellow-gold with golden tinges in colour, it has a tight stream of relatively small bubbles that reach for the top with energy. The nose is very expressive but powerful too, hinting at red berries, flowers, grapefruit, minerals and fresh baked dough. In the mouth, the Pinot Noir comes through with a tight core of small red fruits and spices but especially because of its size, depth and backbone. The wine enters creamy and big, then turns more lemony in the middle and finishes saline and fresh on the long textured back end. A very serious Champane that boasts above average density and complexity for a NV cuvée, not to mention optimal ripeness of the Pnot Noir without any hint of vegetal or green streaks, not always a given in Pinot Noir Champagnes that, despite all their hype, more often than not leave a little something to be desired in terms of ripeness. As the name “Blanc de Noirs” implies, this Champagne is made with red grapes only, in this case 100% Pinot Noir grown in three distinct plots at the top of a hill with about 40% of the wine aged in demi-muids Bourguignons.

Vallone 2016 Graticciaia Salento                                                                                    96

Air-dried wines this good are commonplace only in Veneto, but the fact is that Graticciaia has long been one of Italy’s best red wines and it deserves to better-known. The brainchild of past longtime Agricole Vallone winemaker Severino Garofano, the wine is made with 100% Negroamaro grapes that were historically air-dried on cane mats (“graticci”, in Italian, hence the wine’s name), this is beautiful bright red in colour. Very expressive on the nose, with perfectly ripe red cherry, raspberry coulis, sweet spices, tar, licorice and mineral nuances that then repeat as flavours on the textured, flavourful palate. Suave and supple, the red cherry jam and raspberry coulis notes are extremely refined despite their ripeness and air-dried quality and there is no presence of any green or vegetal notes here, as is often the case with poorly-made air-dried wines. Along with Cosimo Taurino’s Patriglione, Graticciaia was, and is, the game-changing wine for Negroamaro, the grape, and for Puglia, the Italian region where this wine is made, for Graticciaa showed the way of what could be achieved with a variety that had always been thought of as a workhorse grape at best. Not so, not at all. The Vallone 2016 Graticciaia Salento strikes me as one of the more successful, elegant, well-balanced versions of Graticcia in some time. Simply put, it’s just a knockout wine.