Each Friday, David Brenner of Villasfor2 in Abruzzo selects a delicious, top-value 'Everyday Italian Wine' for you to enjoy at home – or on your Abruzzo vacation !

Barbera D'Alba "Parpan". Fontanafredda. 2005

Barbera D'Alba is one of the seemingly endless supply of top-quality reds that appear year after year with effortless ease from the wine treasure-house of Piedmont.

Barbera D'Alba isn't quite as good as its near neighbour Barbera D'Asti – though that's a bit like saying a Maserati isn't quite as good as a Ferrari – but this week's bottle makes up for that tiny discrepancy by coming from one of Piedmont's outstanding producers. Barbera D'Alba "Parpan" is one-up the ladder from Fontanafredda's entry-level Barbera and is an excellent wine at a bargain price.

This is made from 100% Barbera grapes, gathered on a co-operative basis from growers in this particular DOC area. It's given a full year in wood as part of the production process and will drink happily – and get better in the bottle – for up to 10 years from the vintage date, getting progressively smoother and more rounded.

But generally-speaking, Italians like their wines young – hence the appearance on the shelves now of this particular bottle just three years after the vintage. In Piedmont, 2005 was a so-so year, made difficult by heavy rain, with the best wines coming from the best producers. These – as with this bottle – are drinking just fine now, and should whet your appetite for the potentially stupendous 2006 vintage – which really will need a little time to settle down so you can enjoy it to the full.

Here, you'll get a full-blooded blast of liquorice and dark chocolate on opening the bottle. In the glass, quite soft; no real tannis and an almost herbal note, undercut with with damsons and a long, dry finish. It's a wine you can buy with confidence to eat with practically any Italian food, (tempered with my usual plea to throttle-back on the tomatoes), hence its appearance on a great many Italian restaurant wine lists – for the usual outrageous and larcenous mark-up.  

At A Glance…

• This week's featured wine: Barbera D'Alba "Parpan"
• Vintage: 2005
• Producer: Fontanafredda
• Grape: 100% Barbera
• Strength: 13%
• Closure: Cork
• This bottle cost: €4.99

Fontanafredda

This isn't the first time we've featured a wine from this excellent producer. In April we reviewed an absolute gem of a Langhe Arneis white, which is still one of the very best wines we've featured in this series. Fontanafredda is a major player in Piedmont and the English version of its site – irritatingly fiddly to navigate around, but persevere – is casually dotted with great DOCG wines. However it's the quality of the everyday wines from a big producer that impress me and so far, that confidence hasn't been misplaced.

If you like Italian wine, why not check out last week's 'Everyday Italian Wine'- and bookmark this site for future weekly posts !

Next Week: Something very, very special for Christmas. A wine for you to drink at home with your Christmas lunch and enjoy with a special meal on your Villasfor2 Abruzzo vacation

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 4:37 am and is filed under David's 'Everyday Italian Wine', Eating and Drinking, Vineyards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.