There is so much character and beauty in this wine! The high-toned aromas summon thoughts of sautéed plums, cherry jam, sweet saddle leather, loose tea and puréed blackcurrants and those sweetly ripe Puglian flavours make welcome the mouth-watering acidity. The palate is wonderfully generous and full-bodied, but favours fleshy succulence and fine-grained opulence rather than tannic heft with more of those sunny flavours given further complexity with notes of sweet tobacco, wood polish, cigar box spices, fruit-drenched wood and something mysteriously evocative, like the old library in a faded stately home. It leaves you in no doubt as to the wine’s place of origin – the flavours guide you there as if you were following a GPS signal. This is downright delicious! A rambunctious, heart-on-its-sleeve bargain of a wine, which comes with our highest recommendation. 14% alc. A blend of Negroamaro (90%) and Malvasia Nera (10%) aged for two years in wooden barrels and then in bottle. Drink now – 2028.

Press review:

Tamlyn Currin for JancisRobinson.com: “I’m always happy, amazed, and more than a bit relieved when I come across a Salice Salentino that is under 15% alcohol (there are plenty edging towards 16%, to be frank). Farming vines that yield balanced wine on the heel of the boot of Italy is a knife-edge art. It’s hot and dry – grapes want to be raisins. But Cantina San Donaci has somehow pulled off a wine that is 14% and gorgeously fresh, but also every generous molecule of its place. I can taste the beating sun in the dried-cherry fruit, the light singe of cooked plum and molasses, but it’s not ‘cooked’ in the sense of over-hung and over-done, it’s just honest. I can taste Turkish coffee, dark chocolate, roasted almonds, prunes. I can taste delicious tomato jam. It’s a tagine in a glass: smoky, hot bricks, spices-tomatoes-berries-sweetness so melded that there is no telling them apart. The tannins slide down and out, giving way to the fruit like the supporting act gives way to the headline. Sip with slow-cooked mutton. Or chill a little and sip with chickpeas and sun-dried tomatoes drenched in olive oil. Good Value. Drink now-2028.” 17 points

Customer comments:

“Really, really big fan of this. Loved it.” - Mr O.M.