I had this wine last night at the home of friends we don't hang out with nearly enough, accompanying a perfectly cooked strip steak roast. Yum.
The Montona label is the Ultra-premium line of wines from the joint effort between Robert Pepi and Mario Andretti. The name comes from the village where Mario was born on the Istrian peninsula. In 1948 the village was part of the post WWII land settlement and was ceded to then Communist Yugoslavia. The Andretti family fled to Lucca and eventually in 1955 to New York, settling in Nazareth, PA.
Today Montona is part of Croatia and was renamed Motovun.
We were rooting through my friend's cellar when he spied this and it had a mysterious inscription on the bottle, To "C" from xxxxx. "C" just couldn't remember who on earth gave him this bottle. Looked like Jim somebody.
Since it was a 2000 and looked like a nicely made high-end Cab, we went for it.
The nose was very leathery and heady with cigar-box aromas and anise. The wine has a beautiful color and luxurious body to it. It probably started off life as a moderately tannic wine, but with 7 years in the bottle, its edges have smoothed out to a wine with pretty softness. This is really a lovely cab, and a testament to how good wines can be even from what appears to be a vanity project. In fact, it's a pretty serious steak wine.
And who was xxxx who signed the bottle? A quick google search on autographs revealed the answer...Mario Andretti himself! Oops. Maybe he wanted to keep this a bit longer!
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