Sardinian Wine Review
This bottle of 100% Cabernet Sauvignon from 2005 is an excellent example of a beautifully aged red. While in it’s youth, this bottle offers massive amount of fruit and aggressive tar flavors, it has turned supple and refined with age. On the nose, jasmine, wild flowers, and game open into a note of eucalyptus. Top notes of black fruit, honeysuckle, and firewood are juxtaposed to the porcini, horse hair and burnt orange elements that lie just underneath. The finish turns toward rust and dark fruit.
This wine is a complicated, tense, and delicate wine. It’s not for everyone. But it’s definitely for someone who craves difficult but beautiful things. As with all older wines, keep in mind there will be some bottle variation and some bottles will be damaged. Return any bottle that smells of vinegar or cork.
Wine Rating: 93 Points
A great value for a wonderful bottle of aged Sardinian Cabernet.
Winery Background
Sella & Mosca has an essential role in the history of wine. It was originally a vine nursery, which is essential to the commercial wine industry today as it was back in 1899 when it was founded.
A healthy grape nursery back then was a rarity, though. At the turn of the century, the entirety of European vineyards was sick with the Phylloxera louse. The continent’s vines were on the verge of a mass die-off, taking the entire wine industry with it.
But not on the island of Sardinia. The Sella & Mosca nursery was healthy and robust. It turned out that the island’s sandy soil lent it a high degree of immunity to the scourge. And soon, the nursery was one of only a handful of grafting places and planting new disease-resistant rootstocks onto hundreds of grape varieties collected from France, Spain, and Italy. These were the vines that much of Europe was replanted with.
In time, the nursery became a winery in its own right. While most Cabernet grown in Italy was planted in the 1980s, the vineyards at Sella & Mosca date back a century.