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Danilo Thomain - Enfer d'Arvier 2024
Price: $49.99
Sale Price: $39.99
| Producer | Danilo Thomain |
| Country | Italy |
| Region | Valle d'Aosta |
| Varietal | Red Blend |
| Vintage | 2024 |
| Sku | 12017890 |
| Size | 750ml |
Chris Cree MW - Value Score: 100 Points
This little known wine, hewn out of the steep, rocky, Alpine glacial scree terraces in the extreme northwest of Italy in the Val d’Aosta, has become one of our most sought after wines year after year.
This year’s iteration is elegant, perfumed, medium-bodied plus, and the perfect red for the coming spring and summer seasons! Pour it in the glass and immediately fills it with crushed red fruits and a hint of alpine wild flowers and savory herbs. But it doesn’t stop there....
It evolves and changes with just a few minutes, with leather, spicebox, and warm dark fruits emerging, then tobacco and earth fill in to form the bass notes. Just off the boat, this will even be more thrilling in a month or so as it settles in from the voyage, and it will drink great for 3-5 year at least!
If you have had it before you know what we are talking about. If you haven’t, don’t delay! This always gets snapped up in a hurry and then it’s gone for another year.
If there is any wine that I ask you to “trust me, this is the real deal” this wine is it!
It is why you need us to be your wine advisors in a sea of big box/little box generic wine sellers. We offer unique, exceptional, small family domains crafting impeccable, delicious wines, perfect expressions of the people, places, vineyards and grapes from which they are born. Walk down the wine road less travelled with us, and we will find you some of the greatest, least known wines in the world! This is one of them, and if you wait, you will miss it until next year.
What can I say except that this is quite frankly one of the wines whose arrival I look forward to every year more than just about any other! I was first blown away by its utterly unique, one-off character during a ski trip to Cervinia in the Italian Alps (after the best day of skiing I ever had in the Alpen glow of the Matterhorn!) It was perfectly paired with a Veal Chop Val d'Aosta - double cut thickness, stuffed with crisped sage, melted fontina, and prosciutto di Parma - heaven! It has been one of my favorite wines ever since, and when it arrives, if there is any left we’ll recreate that great dinner here at Cree Wine!
It's made from grapes grown in the tiny Enfer d’Arvier appellation, with vineyards located in an amphitheater-shaped bowl on extremely steep, terraced slopes in a high-altitude Alpine valley.
This site provides excellent sun exposure, concentrating and capturing the sunlight, creating a unique microclimate with huge diurnal temperature swings - very warm during the day, with temperatures plunging at night due to the high altitude. The name of the wine, which translates to the "hell of Arvier'' reflects this, as well as the hard work required to farm here. Danilo's the only independent vigneron working this tiny appellation, with just one hectare of vineyards in the shadow of Mont Blanc.
It’s 90% Petit Rouge, an obscure grape not widely grown outside the Valle d'Aosta, if anywhere, with 10% Pinot Noir, Gamay, and Gamaret making up the balance. The vines are rooted in sandy glacial moraines on steeply terraced south-facing vineyards in a natural amphitheater overlooking the Dora Baltea/Doire Baltée river. Natural farming methods are employed (lutte raisoneé.)
The result is this ever so slightly rustic wine, with beautiful aromas of dried herbs, dried cherry, sour cherry, moderate tannins, a lovely core of fruit, a floral top note of violet and lilac. It’s seamless from start to finish, with a hint of underlying stony minerality that stems directly from this wines' roots in the rocky Alpine soils where it is grown.
Danilo Thomain is the only independent vigneron working this tiny appellation only five hectares in size. The Thomain family works one hectare of vineyards here in the shadow of Mont Blanc.
Covering a scant 5 ha, the majority of the Enfer d’Arvier’s output is via the local co-op, and with his single hectare in production, Danilo Thomain stands as the zone’s only independent bottler of wine. Amazingly, he is currently clearing and de-foresting another hectare’s worth of hillside above his current holdings in order to expand production, thereby reclaiming some of the long-unused but prime terrain whose viticultural records date back to the 13th century.
