Alessandro Rivetto, 2012, Barolo

I have a hard time verbalizing what it’s like when you taste a wine and just know it’s not quite ready and needs some oxygen. You just know. You can tell its potential even though isn’t quite right at first. There seems to not be much happening at first sniff and first sip but you just know there is something special waiting in the wings for Miss Oxygen to show up and bring out. When I talk to skeptics who don’t believe that some oxygen can totally change a wine in dramatic fashion, I want to reach into my vast wine cellar and pull out a bottle of Barolo immediately to open their minds. Except I’m not a rich lady with a vast wine cellar so I can’t afford to keep loads of Barolo hanging around for those situations.

I had this bottle on hand from an event I did a while back. I busted out my fancy bedazzled decanter (more on that later) and poured this bottle into it about an hour before dinner. I snuck a sniff and a taste and, while it was underwhelming, I could sense something good was waiting for me if I could be patient.

After about an hour, my dinner was ready and this wine had morphed into something different than it was a mere 60 minutes earlier.

The nose is savory, beefy even, balanced with red fruit, mildly floral, and some baking spice. The palate is all of these things blended together equally. Nothing overwhelms anything else. It’s seamless. The light-ish brick red color is deceiving as this is a full bodied wine, whose tannins mellowed somewhat with the air, but just enough of them stick around for my liking creating a canvas on which the aromas hang on to on a lingering finish.

And holy crap, this wine and my beef ragu and pappardelle dinner were a match made in heaven. I wanted to keep eating the the leftover sauce for dessert long after my pasta was finished because I had more wine to go with it. And they were made for each other.

A note on the decanter. I always tell people to buy a shape that makes them happy. My bedazzled decanter makes me really happy and is so pretty to look at it. It looks like a graceful swan with a diamond collar. It even does its job well. It’s a f*cking bitch to clean. The neck is too narrow for my hand or any brush. And since you want to keep water far away from your wine, you have to just wait for it air dry before you use it again, which could take more than a day. It’s akin to the most popular guy in your high school likely: pretty but dumb. My new decanter advice: Get the easiest one to clean.