Winemaker Notes
This wine is named (I Sistri) after an ancient instrument from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. The instrument and its music was dedicated to the worship of Isis, the godess of agriculture and birth.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Always a beautiful white and this shows lemon curd, vanilla, fresh apricots, peach pit, vanilla and a touch of butterscotch. I love the oiliness to the texture here, which interacts beautifully with the underlying freshness and taut acidity. Full-bodied, but very finely tuned. Drink now.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The Fèlsina 2017 Chardonnay I Sistri is a medium-bodied white wine with equal parts exotic fruit, toast and spice. The oak-driven notes here resemble pastry crust and sweet custard cream. This is a very well-executed and finely crafted wine with balanced thickness, acidity and fruitiness that ultimately find harmony in the glass. Serve it with some Florentine gnudi: spinach and ricotta balls. Some 28,000 bottles were produced. Rating: 91+
One of the most popular and versatile white wine grapes, Chardonnay offers a wide range of flavors and styles depending on where it is grown and how it is made. While it tends to flourish in most environments, Chardonnay from its Burgundian homeland produces some of the most remarkable and longest lived examples. California produces both oaky, buttery styles and leaner, European-inspired wines. Somm Secret—The Burgundian subregion of Chablis, while typically using older oak barrels, produces a bright style similar to the unoaked style. Anyone who doesn't like oaky Chardonnay would likely enjoy Chablis.
One of the most iconic Italian regions for wine, scenery and history, Tuscany is the world’s most important outpost for the Sangiovese grape. Tuscan wine ranges in style from fruity and simple to complex and age-worthy, Sangiovese makes up a significant percentage of plantings here, with the white Trebbiano Toscano coming in second.
Within Tuscany, many esteemed wines have their own respective sub-zones, including Chianti, Brunello di Montalcino and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. The climate is Mediterranean and the topography consists mostly of picturesque rolling hills, scattered with vineyards.
Sangiovese at its simplest produces straightforward pizza-friendly Tuscan wines with bright and juicy red fruit, but at its best it shows remarkable complexity and ageability. Top-quality Sangiovese-based wines can be expressive of a range of characteristics such as sour cherry, balsamic, dried herbs, leather, fresh earth, dried flowers, anise and tobacco. Brunello, an exceptionally bold Tuscan wine, expresses well the particularities of vintage variations and is thus popular among collectors. Chianti is associated with tangy and food-friendly dry wines at various price points. A more recent phenomenon as of the 1970s is the “Super Tuscan”—a red wine made from international grape varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Syrah, with or without Sangiovese. These are common in Tuscany’s coastal regions like Bolgheri, Val di Cornia, Carmignano and the island of Elba.