As Epicurus states: “We must meditate on what brings happiness”. With that in mind, when it comes to wine it is worth pausing to meditate and reflect. In fact, there is a family of wines that are precisely defined as “da meditazione”, or ‘for meditation’. The word itself perfectly describes what wines for meditation are: they are particularly structured and complex wines that require time and calm to be appreciated; they are wines to be savored slowly, to which to devote the right time and attention.
For this reason, meditation wines differ from table wines and aged wines: meditation wines can also be enjoyed alone, not necessarily paired with a dish or food.
Among the wines of the collections of Cantine Leonardo da Vinci there is a meditation wine par excellence: Vin Santo. Produced from Trebbiano grapes harvested by hand in a small hilly area of Vinci, the Vin Santo Villa da Vinci has an intense amber color, exudes aromas of dried fruit, figs, almonds and honey; rich and velvety in the mouth, it is sweet and well balanced by a good acidity.
A red meditation wine is exemplified in the Brunello di Montalcino from I Capolavori Collection, which allows itself to be discovered slowly in its intense fruity hints of blackberries, blackcurrant and cherries. Also in the I Capolavori Collection, the Amarone della Valpolicella Classico is considered a meditation wine for its formidable sensorial qualities: the nose presents an ethereal, intense and persistent bouquet with marked notes of ripe cherry and plum, and hints of vanilla, chocolate, spices and coffee, due to the long aging in wood and refinement in the bottle.
How do you taste meditation wines?
These are wines that accompany every thought, and what could be better than a good glass of wine to devote time to discovering how many stories a bottle can tell?
As the meaning itself says, meditation wine requires time to be tasted and therefore can be tasted either at the end of a meal or at times other than those dedicated to the consumption of food. A lengthy tasting allows you to perceive every detail of the taste experience. The characteristic of having a rich personality with very intense aromas and flavors makes pairing particularly difficult, but usually meditation wines can be paired with sweets, desserts, and cheeses – especially blue cheeses.
In Italy, different types of meditation wines are produced, usually sweet wines, late harvests, passito wines, but they can also be dry wines with a long period of time from harvest to bottle. Meditation wines invite introspection but also to comparison: tasting them in company is a good way to invite you to grasp every nuance, both of aromas and flavors.
