This is a gorgeous wine, which packs a serious punch. The colour is deep suggesting a big dense style but the wine is surprisingly light on its feet. Sweet, pure and vibrant blackcurrant fruits are tempered by dried herbs with some sweeter blackberry underneath. It is soooooo long too with the fruit concentration holding that flavour for minutes. A delicious wine stacked full of personality.

The wine shows stunning fruit purity as well as seductive complexity with cassis, sweet plum, tobacco and spicy oak characters. It’s impressively concentrated and persistent, displaying awesome power brilliantly structured by loads of fine tannins. Multi-layered and graceful.

Air dried fruit (appassimento) alters the tannin structure toward a burlier whole, while changing the nature of the aromas from primary fruits, to more savoury elements. This serves a warm zone like the Vale well. The oak, malty. The density, extract and sheer presence of the wine, forceful. Saturated dark fruits, liquorice, tightly furled coffee grain tannins and mineral. This needs time.

After being air-dried for approximately nine weeks and losing approximately 30% of their weight, the grapes are pressed. The resulting wine is a potent, cassis and herb-laced offering with hints of dark chocolate and caramel yet never heavy or overdone. Fullbodied, rich and possessing a layered texture and a lingering finish, it’s a terrific example of Serpico, with at least a decade of cellaring

Medium-depth ruby colour with brick and purple in the rim. The wine is leafy, mossy, herbal and quite complex, the cabernet family characteristics are there but it’s taken to a more interesting level than just simple cassisy fruit. A little forward perhaps, and pushes the ripeness envelope, but makes attractive drinking already.