Santa Cristina 2016 Chianti Superiore

The night I opened one of my bottles of Santa Cristina 2016, I discovered that it’s excellent with curry, but this wine is a prime example of why you shouldn’t taste a wine when you have an upset stomach (I was fighting a bit of a stomach bug at the time). It did almost nothing for me on night one, so let’s see what happens on night two because it has 90 points from Wine Spectator and I want to give it the benefit of the doubt.

 . . .

Long-ish blog post ahead, consider yourself warned.

. . . .

Day two, and I find that this chianti has a rich smell, lightly acidic on the nose, and is a beautiful, bright ruby-red in the glass. It smells and tastes a bit like morning sunshine feels, bright and crisp, but not overwhelming, which is nice, but also means it’s not the more stereotypical super-dry, great big, rich chianti with solid tannins that I tend to favor. There is a lovely undercurrent of tobacco flowers (not the leaves, the flowers, and this distinction will get important later). The first sip of Santa Cristina is heavy on the red currant and slightly underripe berries, which makes it quite summery. It has light tannins for a chianti, and a long finish. There is the slightest hint of baking spices on the nose, notably vanilla and a touch of nutmeg. It’s mouthwatering, which means it’s a great wine with food. To that end, I had it with homemade deep-dish pizza with sliced steak on top. (Seriously, you should try it. Fantastic.) I find typically that mouthwatering wines are very drinkable because they tend to be lighter and more refreshing as a result, kind of like drinking a tart lemonade, except wine, and, well, alcoholic. If a wine I drink kind of swirls around under my tongue and feels kind of zingy under there, like it’s pulling out a fair amount of saliva, then I know it’s going to be refreshing because it is literally making my mouth water. (And aren’t you glad I said “saliva” and not “spit” in a wine review? You’re welcome.) This is a lower alcohol wine (13%) in the grand scheme of wine alcohol levels, which means that all wine has more alcohol per serving than a serving of beer (with a few notable exceptions), but this wine maybe won’t take you out at the knees in quite the same way as a Mistral-fueled high-alcohol Ventoux red. In short, you could drink it with lunch (which I have done) and not feel like the rest of the day is a total loss of productivity at best or a long nap with a mild but insistent headache at worst.

I have a soft spot in my heart for Chianti. It was the first red wine (or honestly, any wine) that I tried that wasn’t used specifically to wash down a communion wafer at mass every sunday. My dad, who was Italian-American, used to serve seafood on Christmas Eve and would interestingly serve a Chianti Classico alongside, including a small glass each to his pre-teen and teenage children. His chianti of choice was generally the kind in the pear-shaped, raffia-covered bottles (the Italian word for this sort of bottle is “fiasco,” really) that you see hanging from the ceiling of certain Italian restaurants because that was what was widely available in America in the 1970s and 1980s, and especially where we lived, which was, honestly, the middle of nowhere. Dad also served chianti with roast turkey and ham at Thanksgiving, so you just never know what will work (and anything is better than Blue Nun, which is what a lot of people have at Thanksgiving if they decide to drink something other than apple juice, and I would offer that most people would welcome something stronger than apple juice at the average American Thanksgiving). I will be completely honest with you and tell you that this Santa Cristina 2016 chianti is not my all-time favorite chianti, because I reserve that honor for the astounding chiantis produced by the gifted Strozzi ladies of Tuscany, aristocratic descendants of none other than Mona Lisa, whose wine I will cover in another post. This is a perfectly lovely chianti, widely available, and deserving of its 90-point designation from Wine Spectator, although I wouldn’t give it more than that. It’s affordable (I think I paid $15.99 at my local wine shop), goes with a variety of food, and is a nice spring and summer red. It’s not as heavy or as dark as other chiantis and it doesn’t have the richness that I like but that can overwhelm a wine as well as the drinker of said wine if you don’t like giant, powerful wines. Enjoy now.

. . . .

And now we are revisiting the Santa Cristina 2016 Chianti Superiore for a very good, somewhat romantic reason, so please bear with me. Recently, our house started creating problems for itself (we just hit the 20-year-mark in this house and it was brand-spanking-new construction when we bought it, so of course, now it’s time for minor and irritating problems galore). Unfortunately, because my husband and I are both really busy people, both working full-time, having some fun but time-consuming outside interests, and additionally and most importantly being the parents of two active and amazing teenagers, one of whom is headed to university in the fall and one of whom is in so many music groups at their high school that she may as well pitch a tent in the auditorium and stay there, house things tend to slide. The end result is that we’ve been contending with a broken toilet, a problematic tile floor, and a cranky refrigerator over the past few months, in addition to an over-the-stove microwave that literally has a screw loose and is therefore not working and a roof that really needs to be replaced. Yesterday, I finally hit the bullshit button after literally being backhanded by the stop-gap countertop microwave, causing me to drop my coffee mug, spilling all the coffee and ultimately shattering the mug (don’t ask why I was microwaving coffee – it is what it is). My husband, god bless him, took my house repairs tantrum in stride and immediately fixed both the recalcitrant toilet and the gushing refrigerator (it ended up getting an icemaker lobotomy, but so be it, because we never use the icemaker). All of this took until early evening and no one was in the mood to cook anything. After an online takeout order debacle that was too troublesome to detail here, the kids ended up with Fat Shack (hooray!) and Dave and I ended up with Panino’s. I have really high standards for any Italian food, but notably for Italian-American food, given that my dad of the aforementioned Christmas Eve Chianti Adventures was a phenomenal cook and his dad (my grandfather) was a manager at one of the best “red sauce” places on the entire eastern seaboard: The Twin Oaks in Cranston, Rhode Island (https://www.twinoaksrest.com/). I worship these people, and if you ever have the opportunity to eat there, do it and thank me profusely later, preferably with a takeout order of eggplant parm in hand as a temple offering to the goddess/oracle who sent you there. I had never eaten at Panino’s as a result, because I just didn’t want to be disappointed. 

Adventure Cat is intrigued.

I wasn’t. I had eggplant parm half with spaghetti side and a side caesar because god, it’s nice to order with the lingo like you’re back at The Twin Oaks. Dave had a gyro panino (eh?) with side pasta salad which was all pretty great and because I am a nice wife most days, I didn’t judge him for getting a Greek entrée from an Italian restaurant. I had opened my other bottle of the Santa Cristina 2016 a couple hours prior because the multiplying house repairs were starting to drive me to drink, so OBVIOUSLY, I poured myself glass #2 to go with the retro eggplant parm and the 80s rock playlist we had rolling (the kids had long since eaten and retreated to their caves… I mean, rooms), and lo and behold, Dave, who never, NEVER drinks more than a few sips of wine very occasionally, brought a wine glass to the table and poured himself some, too. “Well, if we’re having retro Italian,” he said. “Strictly technically, you’re having Greek food,” I helpfully explained, jabbing my fork at his plate between bites. “Shut up,” he helpfully explained, “and didn’t the ancient Greeks teach the Italians about winemaking anyway?” “Be quiet and eat your GYRO,” I retorted. 

 Dave then took a good long whiff of the chianti and said, “it smells great, kind of tangy, but there’s something else in there between the tang and the fruit.” I told him I could guess what it was, took a long sniff, and replied: “yes, tobacco. Like all good chiantis, this has a fair amount of tobacco to it.” “That’s it,” he said, “but it’s not tobacco leaves or anything like that. It smells like that tobacco flower essential oil you get and that reminds me of the time my grandfather had a hot-air balloon ride in Kentucky for his birthday.”

Adventure Cat is really intrigued.

Dave immediately told me a wonderful story about his grandfather Elmer’s birthday present one year – a hot air balloon ride over rural Kentucky (his grandparents all lived in suburban Louisville, where Dave was born). Grandpa went up in the balloon and Dave rode in one of the chase cars which at one point rattled screamingly down a two-rut dirt track through a fully ripe tobacco field. The scent was heady and overwhelming as the plants were slamming into the sides of the chase cars, but as is the case with straight, unadulterated tobacco, the scent was not at all astringent or offensive. It was just rich and wonderful in the thick southern heat. Dave was maybe eleven years old at the time and as it happens, Grandpa had the time of his life on his ballooning adventure, his young, mostly male gaggle of grandchildren had a rip-roaring good time tearing through Kentucky farmland in the chase cars, and Dave has a fantastic memory that will never fade because if there is one thing that triggers memory, it’s scent. For what it’s worth, the Santa Cristina 2016 Chianti Superiore finally came alive for me with the Panino’s takeout and was the perfect, crisp wine to cut through all the richness of cheese and tomato sauce and gyro meat (of all things) and caesar salad dressing and in my case, perfectly cooked, just-the-right-amount-of-bitter eggplant parm. I would love to say it turned into a really romantic evening after this, but we’re both nearly 49 years old and we fell asleep before we could really address any other retro memories from, say, our university years. Suffice to say, even though my husband is not a wine drinker, it was wonderful watching a few sips of this bright, tobacco-flower-laced chianti trigger such a great memory for him. Maybe it will for you, too.