Jake Hajer

9.1

Dense and muddled. -but balanced. — a year ago

Antone Little

9.0

The Cowfish - Charlotte — 7 years ago

Chance Gaylord

9.3

Smooth & easy drinking. Pleasantly surprised!
— 8 years ago

Sarah Hess

9.3

Trying to see if this thing recognizes beer too. — 10 years ago

Connor Smith

9.3

The first European grapes were planted in what is now the U.S. in the 1600s, where Spanish missionaries in New Mexico needed sacramental wine. But Phylloxera was ever-present near the eastern population centers, so the earliest American wine industries were built on hybrid grapes. Cincinnati's sparkling Catawba was America's first cult wine, followed by cultivars like Norton, Isabella, and Concord in Missouri and Virginia. The sleeping giant began to awaken in the 1850s, when Agoston Haraszthy began importing high-quality vine material to California.

It all came crashing down with Prohibition in 1920. Not only were vineyards ripped up and knowledge lost, but the American palate became soft and sweet. Low-quality fortified wine from whatever grapes were available became the standard of the American wine industry.

Things began to shift in the 1960s. Robert Mondavi brought dry table wine, varietally labeled, back to the forefront. Boutique producers like Ridge began to creep toward European quality standards. The 1976 Judgement of Paris blind tasting, a sweeping victory for the Americans, proved that the New World wine was here to stay.

(This is adapted from notes for Le Dû's Wines 'History of Wine 1453AD-Present' seminar, where this wine was poured) — 5 years ago

Derricke B

10

Damn good. Amazing label too. — 9 years ago

Lobo Di Noccento

10

This wine is known for being fruit heavy in fruits such as Ripe Cherry, Strawberry, and Plum tones.

The nose of this wine blends these strong flavors with a rich scent of pepperiness and on the palate soft tannins accentuate a smooth and lingering finish.

By the way Makulu is a Zulu Nation word which means "Big" and this company's range of wines is known for living up to the name. — 10 years ago

Esther Liu

10

Almost finished the bottle solo. Sweet but not too sweet. Very drinkable. — 7 years ago

Sanet Swanepoel

9.5

Light wine, easy drinking — 8 years ago

Gae Saccoccio - NdC

9.6

Really complicated on these so suspect days, expose themselves with concepts such as: tradition, terroir, identity without falling into the most sinister rhetoric if not sounds just trite and hypocritical as the counterfeit currency with which even large-scale industries - supported by marketing - pays back its inattentive mass audience riding the wave of the country of origin or protected typicality. A diabolical mechanism this one for which even the most noble ideas probably the right practices and good experiences completed in the scale of centuries to human measure and not on massive industrial scale, are trivialized by sleazy slogan, emptied of meaning to be more or less surreptitious thanks to barbaric persuasion techniques and brain-washing propaganda.
Yet with the Valentini's Trebbiano you may not groped to summarize in words if not by drawing on terms so appropriate to express it. Now concerning this iconic label we've got behind it a local grape variety, a real family and a great wine that collect in a bottle the past and present story of a side of Abruzzo who claims to defeats victories and sacrifices to dominate the abuses (on and of) nature, miseries and splendours of agricultural seasons. Places, people, vision, wines such as Valentini are here to remind us how each bottle stay so proudly standing as non-reproducible beauty and fermented goodness expressing all its artisanal uniqueness and authenticity which are just that suspect to industrial wine production in manufacturing chains on standardized quantities; wines that are all equal to themselves even though wine itself is not much left at the end of the day/cycle. Trebbiano d'Abruzzo Valentini 1998 is what we have to rate right now: rusticity with class; style, purity and glory of a local grape recognized by many admirers from all over the world: act local think global this is another slogan-cliché which in this specific Valentini's wine exemple could sounds a little less false and more effective. — 9 years ago

with Alberto and Giovanni