 to exotic wine travel. I am your host, Matthew Horky. We're here in Zagreb, Croatia, still locked down thanks to the coronavirus. My hair is getting crazier than ever. We're going to see if it just gets outrageously long or if I get frustrated and find a buzzer and have to buzz it myself. So, but anyways, we're talking about if this lockdown goes on for any longer, what are the types of wines that you cannot live without? The type of wines that you like to drink every single day, your go-to wines of sorts. So, I'd love to hear from you. You can put after this video, you can put what your go-to wines are in the comment section below. I'm just going to share what is not only mine, but mine and Shareen's go-to grape. And that's San Giovese. It's so funny because Shareen and I don't always agree, right? She just laughs behind. We don't always agree on wine, but where our palates do me is San Giovese and especially the great examples from Chianti Classico in Tuscany. Now, why do I love San Giovese so much? There's a couple of reasons. It's one of the first grapes that I actually tasted when I started to cut my teeth on better wines. I'll share that story with you too. Another reason, I think Shareen hits it on the head. Shareen always says that San Giovese has this perfect blend of sweetness, sourness, and savouriness. It's a grape that doesn't travel very well outside Italy. The best examples are always from Italy. So, I actually did a video San Giovese made simple on it years ago with still racking up views on YouTube. You can check it out. That's when we were a little bit, we weren't as good, we weren't as good as making videos. So, why do I love it? I'm going to share a story with you. When I first started out drinking wine, I was a graduate student, so I was broke. I wasn't really drinking anything besides supermarket wine and I was trying to distinguish the differences between different parts, different supermarket wines, which is funny in itself. During graduate school, I took a backpacking trip to Europe and we went to Luca in the walled city in Tuscany and during that afternoon my friends and I ordered a leader of house wine and was based on San Giovese and I can just remember smelling it, savoring it, sticking my nose in that leader for literally five to ten minutes and my friends all looked at me like I was a little bit weird. So, ever since then I feel like I've had this affinity for San Giovese. I drink it in any style, anything from simple examples from Amelia Romagna all the way up to Chianti Classico, Super Tuscan style wines or Brunello di Montalcino. So, we're going to taste one of the wines here. I have a selection from Rietzene. It's an estate in Gaioli in Chianti, which is in the heart of Chianti Classico. High elevation vineyards and they really specialize in San Giovese. They make Chianti Classico, Chianti Classico Reserva and then two IGT San Gioveses, La Gioia, which means the joy. This is more of a bigger, more modern style San Giovese and then they have the Rietzene di Rietzene and this wine is made with whole clusters, kind of lighter, doesn't see oak more burgundy and stuff. Gorgeous wines, they can't wait to dip into them. But I'm going to taste the Rietzene Chianti Classico 2018 today. The bottle is empty because Sharon and I just polished a bottle off over lunch while she cooked up an awesome pasta, which that pasta gets about 95 points in my book. So, let me, let's take a look and this Chianti Classico has just classic San Giovese flavors and for me, what is that? For me, when I look for classic San Giovese flavors, I look for sour cherry is the number one thing. I look for some cedar flavors, a little bit of white pepper, earth and mineral. And the cool thing about San Giovese is it's one of those rare grapes that develop leather notes fairly easily. So, sour cherry, cedar, a little bit of tobacco, definitely mineral notes. It's layered on the palate. This is the entry level wine. It has texture and the thing that stands out to me in San Giovese based wines is this tangy acidity on the finish. These tangy flavors, almost kind of like a tangerine peel, a little bit of citrus. Just beautiful wine. I mean, this is not meant to be a scoring episode, but this definitely for an entry level wine, super impressive 90 point type of wine for me. So, that's what, that's why I like San Giovese so much. On top of that, it's super food friendly wine. So, let me know in the comment section below. What are you drinking during this lockdown? What are your go-to type wines? And then stay tuned to our website. We're going to have an article reviewing all these wines, but until then, if you like this video, please subscribe to our YouTube channel, Exotic Wine Travel. I will see you at the next episode.