2015 Kin Erbaluce

Late last year, we made the journey into the North of Piedmont to meet with Domenico Tappero Merlo. He is making an exciting dry white wine from Erbaluce under his Kin label. The 2015 Kin Erbaluce di Caluso is a beauty. Very low yielding fruit is harvested ripe and spends time in stainless steel before 18 months in large format French oak from Allier and then 6 months in concrete. It is matured for 2 years in the cellar before release and is built for further aging. There are complex aromatics of smoky mineral, restrained orchard fruits and citrus blossom. The palate really builds and is textural. It possesses red wine levels of dry extract and has an awesome saline minerality to the super-long finish. Genuine vin de guarde that is fabulous now but even better in a decade.

This is a beautiful part of the world and famous Italian dramatist Giuseppe Giacosa, once lived on this estate. He collaborated on the texts for La Bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly.

We brought a couple of bottles back of the 2015 Kin Erbaluce di Caluso to taste at home and put it in a line-up of world class white Burgundy, where it shone. We subsequently ordered a few cases and they have arrived. We can’t recommend the wine highly enough to you. It has Coche-Dury like levels of dry extract and is as splendid a bottle of white that we have tasted this year. JH 2020