Pizza wine.
Written: Jul 29 '08 (Updated Jul 29 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Low alcohol, versatile. Screw cap.
Cons: Inconsistent and too sweet.
The Bottom Line: This slightly fizzy, low-alcohol, off-dry chillable red pairs well with with pizza, beef sandwiches, and other slightly spicy casual fare. It's too sweet for its own good, but not bad.
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| bkalafut's Full Review: Riunite Lambrusco NV |
Due to its placement on supermarket shelves, usually somewhere near the bum wines, Manischewitz, and other miscellaneous abominations, I never thought Riunite Lambrusco worth trying until after I had the more-than-passable Le Grotte.
Until Trader Joe's started regularly stocking Le Grotte, this was nearly the only Lambrusco to be found consistently on store shelves. An "antique" wine, exceeding ly popular before Americans got turned on to dry table wines, Riunite Lambrusco is quite possibly the reason better wines made from this grape are difficult to come by. Sweet and structured more like hard cider or a very soft rosé than a red wine, it made "Lambrusco" synonymous with "kid stuff" among upmarket wine drinkers.
"Lambrusco", however, is not a word for "cheap fizz" but rather a term dating back to Roman times, when this grape was highly prized. And to be fair, Riunite Lambrusco isn't dessert-wine sweet or Boone's Farm sweet but rather white Zin sweet. That residual sugar comes in handy when pairing this with spicy food, such as Chinese takeout, a good pizza, or a Chicago-style beef sandwich, all of which can make dry wines seem a little hot. Its low alcohol content--at 8%, more typical of a German wine or a strong cider than what we're used to--adds to the food-friendliness and makes it suitable for brunches or picnics. There's enough acid here for it to stand up to cheese or rich sauce, enough to give it more of a lemonade-like than an orange pop-like finish.
With no discernible tannins, this is quite a bit more like a rosé than a red, and should be served cold, but it has some characteristic red-wine flavors, evocative of raspberries or strawberries. A good bottle of this has a peppery zip like Australian shiraz or some zinfandels, but this is inconsistent. Riunite Lambrusco is an "industrial" wine and likely varies as the grapes are taken from different sources, some using entirely different clones of the ancient Lambrusco grape.
In short, it isn't bad at all. Less sweet than Coca-Cola, it's hardly the "cloying" sugar bomb some people make it out to be. (Perhaps, like Blue Nun and a few similar mass-market dinosaurs, it has changed with the times.)
It could nonetheless be further improved by reducing the residual sugar, which somewhat dampens its flavor when not paired with food. Consider Riunite Lambruco a dependable accompaniment to pizza and a good choice for picnics and parties at which many of the guests are not wine drinkers, more an alternative to cheap white Zin or Woodchuck cider than to the rare, drier, more concentrated upmarket Lambruscos which occasionally reach the US market.
Recommended:
Yes
Varietal: Other
Country: Italy
State or Region: Emilia
Price: 5
Wine Rating Scale: Drinkable
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Epinions.com ID:
bkalafut
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 in Restaurants & Gourmet |
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Member: Bennett Kalafut
Location: Tucson, AZ, USA
Reviews written: 259
Trusted by: 43 members
About Me:
Stretching single molecules for fun and profit.
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