Our Provenance Guarantee
Purchase with confidence. All of our wines come from well verified sources. Every bottle is thoroughly inspected for authenticity and signs of poor storage. Accepted bottles are held in our climate-controlled cellar until they reach your doorstep. We have no storefront and no walk-in traffic, so nothing is moved or handled between inspection and shipping.
The bottle you see photographed is the bottle you receive (or fundamentally identical when multiple bottles are listed), and we guarantee it arrives in the condition shown. If it doesn’t, we want to hear from you.
Ratings & Tasting Notes:
18/20 — Jancis Robinson, March 2010
Noting that this was the last vintage classified as Vino da Tavola. Deep garnet still, with a very youthful and healthy colour. A fine leafy, pencil-lead nose without any greenness, showing amazing freshness and purity. Fine dark cherry fruit remains, with delicacy and finesse. Mineral, dry and mouthwatering, elegant and still carrying some sweetness.
Wine Advocate, August 1997 — no score published
A tannic, stern, austerely styled Sassicaia, revealing a dark ruby-purple colour followed by attractive cassis fruit with weedy tobacco and herbs in the background. New oak is present but not intrusive. Medium-bodied, with high tannin, good acidity and a firm, structured feel on the palate.
Wine Spectator, October 1996 — no score published
Pretty cassis, berry and slightly herbal aromas which follow through on the palate. Medium-bodied, moderately tannic, with a light finish.
Cult Wines International Notes:
Sassicaia is the wine that changed Italy. Mario Incisa della Rocchetta planted Cabernet Sauvignon at Bolgheri in the mid-1940s, on stony coastal ground nobody thought fit for fine wine, wanting a claret of his own. For a quarter of a century the wine was drunk only by family and friends. The first commercial release, the 1968, appeared in 1971 under oenologist Giacomo Tachis and the counsel of his cousin Piero Antinori, and it arrived as a scandal: a Tuscan coastal Cabernet sold as humble Vino da Tavola. Within a decade it had beaten the world’s great Cabernets in blind tastings and created the category the press named the Super Tuscans.
The 1993 is the last Sassicaia ever bottled under that Vino da Tavola label. The following year the estate was granted DOC Bolgheri Sassicaia, its own appellation and Italy’s only one belonging to a single property, so this vintage closes the outsider chapter of the story. The wine itself was made in a firm, classical mould: deep ruby to garnet, with cassis and dark cherry fruit framed by pencil lead, tobacco leaf and dried herbs, the new oak present but never intrusive. Critics tasting it at seventeen years still found the colour youthful and the nose remarkably fresh and pure, with real delicacy and finesse behind the structure. Mineral, dry and mouthwatering, with the austerity of its youth now settled into elegance.
Bottle Size:
750 mL
Storage History:
Always stored on its side in a climate-controlled cellar.
Condition:
Please note: The bottle shown is the exact bottle being sold.
Outstanding condition.
