I’d like to start this post by asking for help from people. How on God’s green earth do you cook an artichoke??? I popped it in the stew with the tomatoes, olive, and beef shin. I let it simmer away for a few hours, tried it, and it was like trying to eat wood chippings! Took longer to take all the pieces out of the ragu than it did to eat the thing itself!!
Anyway, enough of all that! The rest of the stew was great, and the wine this week, the Taste The Difference Primitivo kindly supplied by Sainsbury’s was…well…nice!
I say nice rather than anything more or less. Bear in mind that with anything “IGT” we’re looking to get what we expect to get. It’s meant to be a stamp of “does what it says on the tin!”
The colour was clear deep ruby and vibrant looking. Exactly what I was expecting. Ok tick that one off.
On the nose, it wasn’t jumping out the glass at me. There was the liquorice and pepper spice, and the black fruit of plums and dark cherries that we were meant to get. So again, tick that one off. Not exactly intense and complex, but pleasant.
On the taste it was a bit funny. Don’t get me wrong, it was very drinkable. It just didn’t have anywhere near the body I was expecting. A big thing here was that it’s only 13% alcohol. With a Primitivo I’m expecting much higher. Not sure whether they’ve used techniques to take a bit of alcohol out, or harvested early maybe? Either way, it was much lighter in the mouth than I was expecting.
As I said, very drinkable, but not as heavy as I’d expect from a Primitivo. Slap bang in the middle of the “Good” range of 8-12, so 10/20.
Cheers
