It would be difficult for me to name just one wine as the one… there have been many, and there
were a few early on that really made a lasting impression that I remember to this day.  I was a big fan of Barolo for as long as I can remember, but another Italian wine outshines Barolo in my past.  I worked in an Italian Bistro in Syracuse called Antonio’s, one of those special places where there was a bottle of wine on every table every night.  Our top selling expensive wine (La Scolca Gavi and S. Margarita Pinot Grigio were the most popular) was Masi’s Campolongo Torbe, a single vineyard Amarone which sold nightly (and at $80 a bottle, which was a lot in the 1980s) and we always seemed to have a good supply.

But there was another wine on the list that I never sold, until I bought it.  The owner let me pay
half of the $100 price just so he could get rid of it(at least, that’s what I think).  It was Mastroberardino’s Taurasi Reserva 1973. One of Italy’s top wines, if not her least well-known.  And from a wonderful vintage.  I remember thinking this is what I could expect from those nice Barolos if only we gave them ten years in the bottle; we rarely gave them three.  Silky, elegant and layers of complex flavors, I began the next day buying the Reserve bottling of the Taurasi every time I found it.

I was rarely able to find it, but in 1988 my girlfriend and I spent a month in Italy, and a week of that was in Ostuni, an easy drive to Brindisi on the Adriatic.  In a wine shop in Brindisi I found the 1977 Mastroberardino Taurasi Reserve for next to nothing a bottle, and I think that week we drank all they had, maybe 7-8 bottles!  

It’s harder to find nowadays; maybe they stopped bottling the Reserve, maybe because an earthquake destroyed their stock of mature reserve bottles, but I keep looking!  My last bottle, a 3 Ltr of the 1977 vintage, I served at a lunch meeting for ABC’s Wine Consultant staff about a dozen years ago… wish I had more!

Shayne Hebert, Central Florida Wine Supervisor

Follow me on Twitter @abcwineshayne