Super-Tuscan: The Quest

If you’d like to taste Piero Antinori’s groundbreaking Tignanello wine, take a number, get in line and hope for the best. So little of it is shipped to the United States that getting rid of it becomes a major diplomatic exercise for wine sellers.

Because so little wine is available, it is sold on allocation, which means that wine stores can only order a certain number of bottles--and even then, only certain wine stores will get any at all.

“We don’t get nearly what we could sell, so we have to allocate the wine,” says Erle Martin, wine manager for Young’s Market Co., which wholesales the Antinori wines in California, explaining how he decides who gets how much. “It’s an inexact science. If we’ve got a guy (shop) who supports the entire Antinori line, then we try to support him with Tignanello.”

In other words, buy so many cases of the bottom-of-the-line Chianti, and you can have so many bottles of Tignanello.

Your best bets are high-end stores such as Wally’s in Westwood, the Wine House in West Los Angeles, and the Wine Club in Orange County. But don’t count on it. The wine rarely gets to the shelf. It is almost always held in the back room, out of sight, for regulars who reserve it. As one Los Angeles wine merchant explains: “We have one customer who says, ‘However much Tignanello you get, I’ll take it all.’ Obviously, we can’t do that.” In fact, that customer may get three bottles.

Or, you can find it on the wine lists of such restaurants as Valentino and Peppone.

How’s the wine? The 1988 Tignanello, which has just been released, is 80% Sangiovese and 20% Cabernet Sauvignon. The aroma is classic with cherry and rose-petal fruit and a distinctive anise-like note from the Sangiovese. The taste is perfectly balanced, without so much oak that it tastes like a tree, but enough to give the wine a cedary aftertaste. Drinkable now, the wine should age for a decade or more.

Tignanello sells for $45 a bottle, but you’ll be lucky to find it at $50, says Martin. If you can find it at all.