Morei Cilindrica Teroldego Vigneti delle Dolomiti IGT 2016 1500ml Magnum

Wine description for Morei Cilindrica Teroldego Vigneti delle Dolomiti IGT 2016 1500ml Magnum by Foradori

Colour & appearance

Violet with purplish reflections — dark, dense, with youthful depth despite its years in bottle. The magnum format has clearly done the wine good: it appears fresher than one might expect from a 2016.

Nose

Initially remarkably restrained — this wine needs air and a generous swirl. Then pomegranate, cranberry, sour cherry and redcurrant emerge, underpinned by elderberry, a herbal spiciness and an almost archaic note of fired clay and calcareous earth. Darker and more closed than the 2017 vintage, for example; patient aeration is rewarded.

Palate

On the palate, the wine opens up noticeably: the fruit becomes juicy and dense, revealing a sweet, dark core of fruit. The tannins are polished and round, while the acidity lends tension and vibrancy without dominating — riper than the nose initially suggests. A wine of considerable structure that continues to evolve in the glass over several hours.

Finish

A long, warming finish with dark berry fruit and that earthy depth and precision which gives the wine its name — Morei means dark in the Trentino dialect. The impression remains dry, straightforward and finely delineated.

Terroir & origin

The single vineyard site Morei in the Campo Rotaliano (Mezzolombardo, Trentino) covers 2.5 hectares of alluvial soil: stony, compact and dark. Nearby, steeply rising rock faces shield the vines from cold northerly winds and store heat during the day, releasing it back into the vineyard at night. In contrast to its counterpart — the Sgarzon site on dolomitic limestone — Morei always produces the darker, more fruit-intense wine. The Campo Rotaliano itself is a geological peculiarity: a valley plain surrounded by three-thousand-metre peaks, where over millennia the River Noce has deposited limestone, porphyry and gneiss from the Dolomites.

Grape variety & vinification

Teroldego — the very grape variety that Elisabetta Foradori rescued from near-oblivion in the mid-1980s through years of mass selection from almost forgotten old clones, at a time when all of Italy was planting Cabernet. For the Cilindrica, the wine was first aged for eight months on the skins in tinajas — Spanish 420-litre clay amphorae — before being racked into concrete tanks in spring 2018, where it settled over the summer. One third of the cuvée was then transferred for a further year into cilindricas, 330-litre cylindrical amphorae — without skins. The reserva among the amphora wines.

Food pairing

The dark fruit and polished structure stand up well to bold flavours: duck ragù with pasta, for instance, or borscht risotto. For a vegetarian option, serve with lentil salad with roasted carrots, pomegranate seeds and spiced labneh — the wine holds its own against the spices and mirrors the pomegranate notes in the dish.

Special features

What sets this wine apart from other expressions of Teroldego is the cilindrica ageing: a second year in amphora reserved for just one third of the production, a process that imparts a deeper, more serene fruit character. Add to this the choice of the magnum format — greater volume, slower maturation: precisely the right decision for a 2016 vintage that can still appear youthfully structured even today. The estate has been Demeter-certified for many years; since Foradori’s rescue of the variety, Teroldego has been regarded as one of Italy’s most significant grape varieties.

A concluding thought: the 2016 magnum today makes a compelling case for patience — a wine that only reveals with the second glass what the Dolomites can leave behind: both darkness and warmth in equal measure.