Cantine Lonardo, Taurasi DOCG

Just one day after tasting (and being blown away by) today’s wine, a post from a winemaker I deeply respect appeared on my Instagram feed: It showed a bottle of 1968 Taurasi from Mastroberardino and the winemaker’s breathless commentary on its impressive showing at 50 years of age. This winemaker is one of the shrewdest Italian wine collectors I know and Mastroberardino ’68 is a mythical wine among Italian wine enthusiasts (I’m actually surprised bottles still exist), but also one of only a few mythical bottlings to emerge from Taurasi, which by any measure should have more such wines to its credit.I chalk this up to economics: Mastroberardino was for a long time one of the only commercially viable producers in the appellation, which, being in the relatively poor Italian south, had to play catch-up with faster-evolving regions such as Barolo, in Piedmont, to which Taurasi is often compared. Today’s 2012 from Cantine Lonardo reinforced something I’ve believed for a while now: This is Ta