2011 Faustine Rose

The Abbatucci 2011 Ajaccio Rose Faustine – 70% Sciacarellu; 30% Barbarossa (another of Corsica’s ancient Italian transplants, in this instance from Emilia-Romagna) – launches an exuberant charm offensive on the nose, with pungent pink grapefruit and blood orange rinds; resinous herbs and coniferous scrub; ocean breeze; and intimations of the fresh red currant and oyster liqueur that go on to strikingly vie for attention with citrus oils and herbal essences on an exceptionally bright, concentratedly interactive palate. This finishes with a bracing, saliva-liberating bath in the ocean. Expect at least another 9-12 months’ delicious versatility, but beyond that I don’t yet have the experience to project. (I’ll try to keep my hands off of my last bottle for a couple of years.) I can’t recall ever tasting a finer rose, and it certainly counts as an outstanding value. (How could this wine be so sensational while the bottle of 2010 I reviewed in Issue 196 was merely very good? I’m suspicious in retrospect that the latter was unrepresentative – its bitterness perhaps traceable to taint – though I’m usually hyper-sensitive to TCA’s effects. I can however state unequivocally that my review of this 2011 is no fluke, because I’ve been drinking the bottles I bought and one is as wonderful as the next.) What to make of a biodynamic wine grower whose unorthodox methodology includes having the choral polyphony for which his homeland is famous broadcast to his vines (and the sheep that graze them) as well to his young wines? Now that Jean-Charles Abbatucci has begun to acquire some of the fame he deserves, I’m told the music – rather than emanating from loudspeakers mounted to his pick-up – is performed live. Recent projects at this 50-acre (20-hectare) estate just outside Corsica’s capital Ajaccio on the island’s west coast include two “Imperial” bottlings sourced from Sciacarellu vines that have been left, un-pruned, to revisit their riparian roots as he imagines them having done for centuries. Another profoundly important project whose results – just two of which I have yet tasted – I can only characterize as awesome, involves vines from ancient Corsican cultivars that Abbatucci’s father collected as cuttings and established on a rocky granitic site in the early 1960s. This vineyard was never intended as a museum, but rather as a living link – in some instances possibly the very last – to vine varieties and a way of life that persisted just short of a millennium from the Pisan and Genoese conquests (with vines in tow) to the mid-20th century. In that spirit, Abbatucci, his horses and singers cultivate it, resulting in a Cuvee Collection with wines labeled to honor several of his heroic Napoleonic military and diplomatic ancestors. Collectively, Abbatucci’s wines will stretch your palate, your imagination, and even your notions about what wine is or can be. (And you’ll have fun drinking them.) Importer: Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Berkeley, CA; tel. (510) 524-1524