Score: 92/100
In the ‘Riserva Baiana’ name of this cuvée, the ‘Riserva’ is not just marketing decoration. This Franciacorta sparkling wine is the best attempt from La Montina winery at producing a wine that represents their savoir-faire.
The Baiana is made from a drastic selection of the best grapes, from 45% Pinot Nero (Pinot Noir) and 55% Chardonnay. Grapes are gently pressed and the wine vinified in lightly-toasted wine barrels. After fermentation in bottle, the wine spends at least 60 months on its lees, a long aging making the essence of a Riserva’s complexity and smoothness.
This is a Pas Dosé (also called Zero Dosage, or Non Dosé) bubbly, meaning no sugar was added at bottling, to preserve the genuine expression of the wine.
So How Good this La Montina Riserva La Baiana actually Taste?
Tasting Notes:
The wine comes in a bright lemon yellow color, with both slightly green and golden hues.
The aromas express an unusual expression of freshness and minerality.
Intense notes of fresh lemon, briochy dough, honey and flowers, and roasted nuts. It’s the smell of a lemon tart the toasty meringue on top that would have been sprinkled with roasted almonds.
Certainly tempting, but also elegant a nose.
The palate literally explodes in your mouth with bursting and intense flavors of nuts, delicate almond again, also rich and resiny pine nuts.
Plenty of confit citrus fruit as well, lime and lemon, some grapefruit. Sweet spiciness to it too.
A stunning buttery complexity in the flavor profile then.
Despite being a non-dosé (no added sugar during tirage), the wine displays what appears like a nearly perfect balance. No sweetness is perceptible, but the wine’s body, silky texture and refined bubbles greatly match the soft yet characterful acidity and minerality.
Overall
A Vintage Riserva Franciacorta sparkling wine that simply stuns by its balance and its refinement.
It’s stunning because every aspect of it, flavors and aromas, seems to be perfectly matched by its counterpart creating a highly enjoyable sensation of balance and fulfilment, of plenitude.
Floral and honey aromas are matched but delicately-smoky roasted nuts characters, the richness of the citrus fruit flavors by the buttery dough tones, the sustained acidity by a wealthy of body and oily texture, the fine coating bubbles by a subtle salty and astringent finish.
Long-aging on lees sparkling wine characteristics, meet an obvious respect of the quality of great primary fruit charms.
Plenty to experience, plenty to enjoy all along the tasting.
Enjoy
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