Thank you to everyone who joined us on Saturday, June 13th for our live-via-webcast tasting featuring the wines of Marchesi Antinori. We’re grateful to Marchese Piero Antinori for taking the time to guide everyone through a wonderful tasting, and also to our panelists Master Sommelier Rob Bigelow and Glenn Salva (general manager of Antica Napa Valley) for helping lead the discussion. If you couldn’t attend, you can watch the entire broadcast in the video above.

If you’re looking for more information about this event and the wines we tasted, please take a look at our prior blog post here.

We had a lot of great questions for Piero from social media, but due to time constraints we couldn’t answer them all live. We followed up with Piero Antinori and received a few more responses from him. Here’s what he had to say.

PA: “The wines [we sampled] today were a great representation to answer just this question.  Another wine to consider is the Villa Antinori Toscana, which is a Sangiovese red blend that is also carried at Total Wine & More.  It is a great expression of Tuscany, but also has a history of tradition and innovation within the Antinori family of estates – is is a great introduction to the wines of Antinori.”

PA: “The advantage is to create a new expression or flavor profile of the wines that might not be available to the winemaker if they were using a 100% of one varietal.  Every winemaker might have a different reason and some may also do this to leverage the grapes that do better in certain weather conditions. For example, to help balance out extreme hot, cold, dry or wet vintages.”

PA: “Col Solare focuses on Cabernet Sauvignon, where as the vineyards in Tuscany have a large variety of grapes, but mainly focus on Sangiovese and Cabernet Sauvignon. Sangiovese is a late ripening grape, thin skinned and can be very finicky, so far it seems to love its home in Tuscany the best.  Bill St. John, a well known wine journalist wrote a recent article on just this topic.” 

PA: “It depends on the meal, but one of the Antinori Chainti wines is a common sight at the table as well as Vermentino or Antica Napa Valley Chardonnay for a white wine selection.”

PA: “Yes, we enjoyed them all. Wine is too precious to waste!”