ffers ripe red fruit flavors of cherry, raspberry and a touch of blackberry, with the wood still present and flashes of milk chocolate, vanilla and spice. Rich and dense, with assertive tannins that need to be resolved. Non-blind Petrolo Galatrona vertical (November 2021). Best from 2025 through 2043. 3,000 cases made, 200 cases imported.
Despite the hardships of the vintage, Luca Sanjust and the team at Petrolo poured all their focus and attention into creating this wine. The 2017 Galatrona shows a hot-vintage interpretation of Merlot that never feels too ripe or heavy. Instead, this wine ushers forth a remarkable succession of balsam herb-like aromas with Mediterranean shrub, rosemary essence and wild sage. Those garden-fresh aromas accompany the dark blackberry fruit that gives this wine its important center of gravity. The Merlot harvest came two weeks early in 2017, and yields were greatly reduced. I am suggesting a slightly shorter drinking window for the 2017 vintage compared to the cellar-worthy 2016 edition.
We at Petrolo, vine-growers in the Vald’Arno di Sopra, disciples of Nepo da Galatrona, by tradition, culture and education Heraclitian, Dyonysian-Epicurean-Lucretian, Hermetic-Fician, Leonardesque neo-Platonic and Giorgionesque neo-Aristotelian, romantics and revolutionaries, we believe that God is in all things, and that the earth itself is God; and that everything is fertile, vital, wet, crackling, lush. And that man is joined to heaven by means of his divine element and is in all things and all places occupying the core of the ramified and highly complex configuration of animal and vegetable beings: the heart of that infinite affinity of all things which is the Universe-World. And we winemakers, men and women rushing to the future in leaps and bounds, turn back toward the original and the ancient, believing that the revelation of the world breathing was silent and by just being silent and listening to nature, as it appears at intervals, occult and enigmatic, glittering like flashes of memory, guiding us to dynamic future ways of wine from the inside out, from top to bottom, from the future to the past. And we believe that wine, a great wine, is the poetic alchemical metamorphosis of nature into culture. And that only by having a light hand and gentle heart are we able at times to bend nature to our sentiments, to humanize it and making it more beautiful, like a reality imagined in a dream. Wine is nature as dreamed by man, thus enhanced by sentiment; a wine that is great, a great wine, is nature transformed; which only at the moment of drinking elevates itself and its natural essence because it immediately inspires desire and memories. All of nature is in wine, but wine is not only nature. (Luca Sanjust, Translation by Burton Anderson)
