While some wineries, despite their best intentions, start life out on the right foot, others hit the ground running and meet with success basically from day one. This is the case of Tenuta Fratini, located in the Bolgheri area located near Donoratico, in the central part of the denomination. I taste wines from new wineries all the time, and I can’t begin to tell you how often I have had to sit in tasting rooms during my lifetime in wine tasting through well-made but completely uninteresting wines produced by some hot-shot consultant winemaker and a guarantee to get high scores from the same old American wine critic. But such wines, despite the hype that is piled on by tail-wagging unimportant scribes eager to please but that absolutely fail to move the needle in any meaningful way in terms of sales, are essentially useless: the scores of 95 and higher they receive will ultimately serve no purpose, because those wines tastes like a thousand others made all over the world. You know the drill: low pH, coffee and cocoa notes galore, vanilla, perhaps some residual sugar, and oh-so boring! At a time in our lives when wine sales are falling everywhere and interest in wine, especially on the part of the younger generations is at an all-time low or close to it, that is a recipe for disaster. But not everybody understands as much.
