Super Tuscans?

[stevebody]

The spectre of someone casting a whole class of wines in an unflattering light just because they violate your sense of decorum or tradition is really sad, not to mention lame. I say this with requisite gravity, as I enjoy the give and take on this site but this tired, overwrought business of running down Super-Tuscans just because they aren't the wines that have been made in Tuscany since time immemorial - or, even sadder, because they employ "French Grapes"(?) - is the same sort of thing as the middle-aged putzes in the 1950s who screamed bloody murder because those damned kids quit buying Frank Sinatra and Hugo Winterhalter records. Time marches on and I doubt that Roberto Guldener, Angelo Gaja, Ricardo Cotarella, et al are sitting up nights worrying about what we think of the way they're "ruining" Italian winemaking. The simple fact is that the Italians have a serious knack for growing and bottling the French varietals and the wines that result are often more flavorful, complex, and interesting than the French or American efforts with the same grapes. The handle "Super Tuscan" is applies to wines that simply combine Sangiovese, most often, with one of the French grapes or sometimes even to wines that contain - Gasp!! - no freakin' Italian grapes at all!! Horrors!! Anyone who can drink a bottle of the La Carraia Fobbiano, Falesco Montiano, Domenico Clerico Arte, Monsanto Tincsul, or Tua Rita Guisti di Notre and not realize that they've tied into a hellacious fine bottle of vino is best left to stew in their own Fogey-ish, pole-up-the-butt inertia. Don't like those wines? Wonderful! More for the rest of us. At very least, if you're clinging to the tattered vestiges of 70s-style wine snobbery, have the good graces not to wave it like a flag, as though you represented a constituency. These wines are here to stay and probably to proliferate and no amount of gassin' and crabbin' is going to change that. Let the newcomers to the many varieties of Italian (and every other country's) damned wines make up their own minds about the wines, okay? Don't saddle them with your petty prejudices. Jeez... And, yeah, I am perfectly aware of how peremptory I come off here. I sell wine all day and every 40th customer or so is one of those hidebound ninnies, to whom I have to be civil. No such quarter here. Here be unfiltered discourse, plain talk, and straight shootin'. (sound of loud raspberry)