Wine of the Week: Luna di Luna Pinot Grigio delle Venezie
Wine: Luna di Luna Pinot Grigio delle Venezie
Grape: Pinot grigio
Region: Northeastern Italy
Vintage: 2010
Price: $3.99
Availability: Lee’s Discount Liquors
In the glass: Luna di Luna Pinot Grigio is a fine pale citrine color with a clear, bright core going out into a translucent and lightly greenish-tinted edge and clear rim definition with medium viscosity.
On the nose: The wine has a lovely white fruit fragrance right off the bat with a sort of hypothetical white cran-raspberry and green honeydew melon melange, then pear skin and light citrus notes and finally a supple minerality underlying.
On the palate: It is a crisp and softly acidic wine with excellent white fruit delineation and sweetish underlying citrus and pear and apple sauce character. There’s excellent balance in this wine, fluidly mixing the acidity with the fruit and the citricity through the midpalate and into a nicely lingering finish that should satisfy even the savviest of tastes.
Odds and ends: This is an excellent chance to taste a pinot grigio at full maturity with all the characteristics that such a bottle entails. We are often beguiled by the promise of drinking light-bodied and fresh white wines as the mercury steadily rises through the spring, at least here in Las Vegas. Nowadays pinot grigio is very much on the forefront of American wine drinkers’ minds, as it is the most popular of the dry white wines available in the market. It beat out chardonnay for the title some years ago. Luna di Luna is a winery in the northeastern corner of Italy, in the so-called Tre-Venezie region, which is made up of Veneto, Friuli and Trentino. The white wines from there tend to be cool, light-bodied and crisp in nature and this wine is no exception. Cutting right to the chase here, this is a splendid drinking wine for all occasions and at just less than $4, a complete no-brainer for consumers. Be sure to grab it by the case and you’ll have a good time all through the summer with it. It is just perfect all by itself in a glass and chilled to about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, or you can alternatively try it with some grilled jumbo prawns or calamari. Drink it now through 2015, but not much longer, because it is at its peak now.
Gil Lempert-Schwarz’s wine column appears Wednesdays. Write him at P.O. Box 50749, Henderson, NV 89106-0749, or email him at gil@winevegas.com.
