Our Provenance Guarantee
Purchase with confidence. All of our wines are selectively sourced and thoroughly inspected for authenticity and signs of poor storage. Accepted bottles are preserved 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 our commitment to you is that it arrives as represented. If it doesn’t, we want to hear from you.
Ratings & Tasting Notes:
No professional critic score specific to this bottling and vintage was found at the time this listing was created. Wine-Searcher’s aggregate for the 1996 is 88/100.
Cult Wines International Notes:
Castello del Terriccio sits along the Tuscan coast about ten miles north of Bolgheri, on an estate with an extraordinary history: Etruscan miners, bishops, counts of Pisa and a Polish prince have all held this land. Proprietor Gian Annibale Rossi di Medelana watched the rise of Sassicaia on the coast below and set out to make wines of that ambition from his own soils, in a maritime microclimate that few Tuscan estates can match. The house today makes a small, prestigious portfolio: the eponymous Castello del Terriccio, the Cabernet-based Lupicaia, and Tassinaia.
Tassinaia takes its name from a farmhouse on one of the estate’s hills, Le Tassinaie — the place of the stones. It is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in almost equal proportion, grown on sandy soils with a subtle gravel texture, rich in trace elements. The wine spends sixteen months in French oak tonneaux before the varieties are blended, then rests at least a further twelve months in bottle before release. The two green lines on the label represent the estate’s fields in springtime. The first Tassinaia was made in 1992, making this 1996 an early bottling from the wine’s founding years.
1996 was a warm year on the Tuscan coast, September in particular. Three decades on, expect a solid ruby fading a little at the rim, with wild cherry, blackberry and mineral on the nose, good substance and texture on the palate, and a warm, blackberry-dominated flavour now settled into full maturity.
Bottle Size:
750 mL
Storage History:
Always stored on its side in a climate-controlled cellar.
Condition:
Outstanding condition.
Please note: The condition of the bottle you will receive is accurately reflected by the one shown in the images.
