Top 100 Symposium: Meroi - Wine & Spirits Magazine
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Top 100 Symposium: Meroi


We look forward to welcoming Paolo Meroi at the Top 100 Symposium in New York City. He’ll be pouring the Meroi wines on January 14, 2020 at Union Park Events. Here is Stephanie Johnson’s profile of the winery printed in our 2020 Buying Guide:


Wines from the recently-acquired Zitelle vineyard have propelled Meroi to the next level.

Paolo Meroi’s great-grandfather founded this estate nearly 100 years ago in the Buttrio subzone of Friuli Collio Orientali. The warm microclimate is well-suited to the production of red wines, but Meroi focuses on whites, particularly since 2004, when he added the Zitelle vineyard to his holdings. Meroi knew the vineyard well, having rented vines in Zitelle for a decade, and he replanted the vineyard’s rock-studded clay soils with white varieties to take advantage of the site’s northeast exposures and cool evening breezes. Bucking the modern trend toward crisp, reductive white wines, Meroi ages his whites in French oak barriques to develop opulent textures and rich, layered flavors, like those found in the 2016 Zitelle Durì, stunning in its expressive aromas and flavors, or the a bold, distinctive 2016 Zitelle Pesarin, the first release from a plot planted to friulano. The 2017 chardonnay, coming off a south-facing plot in the Vigna Dominin vineyard, is rich yet precise, blazing its own stylistic path between chardonnays from Burgundy and California.



2016 Friuli Colli Orientali Zitelle Durí (94 points)
This malvasia aged for one year in barriques (80 percent new), gaining notes of vanilla bean and candied florals as well as an opulent texture that envelops the ripe apricot, peach and almond flavors.



Taste this and more of the top-scoring wines of 2019 at the Top 100 Symposium in NYC.

This story was featured in W&S Winter 2019.


This story appears in the print issue of Winter 2019.
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