Wine friends, 

Giuseppe Cortese is another one of our every season producers. Open Tuesday is “all in” on these delicious traditional Langhe wines.

By now, most of you have tried a few of Cortese’s wines, so I’ll keep today’s write-up short. 

Italian wine lovers tend to be very familiar with the legendary quality and value of Cortese’s Barbaresco wines. As I researched the Cortese lineup of wines for OT, it wasn’t a surprise that the Barbaresco and Barbaresco Rabaja stood out.

What did shock me was the quality of today’s wine, Cortese’s Barbera Morassina, a wine that’s hard to find outside of Italy. (The Langhe Bianco Scapulin surprised me too. Unfortunately, it won’t be available again until early 2025.) 

What’s so special about Morassina? Year in and year out, it’s one of the richest and most expressive Barberas on the Italian wine market. It’s also the best value single-vineyard Barbera made in Piedmont. The quality you get for around $25 seems almost too good to be true.

I’m certainly not alone in that assessment. This wine has already earned 92+ points from a major international wine critic. You can read about it on the Cortese Facebook page.

Giuseppe Cortese 2020 Barbera d’Alba Morassina

The 2020 Cortese Morassina is a fruit-forward, balanced red wine made from the Morassina vineyard in Barbaresco. Like the 2019 Morassina we offered last year, today’s 2020 shows incredible richness and pure fruit expression in the glass. It has slightly more primary fruit at this point than the 2019, and is also a touch less earthy. This 2020 is full-bodied, vibrant, lightly tannic, and extremely drinkable.

Check out all the awards earned by the 2019 Barbera Morassina here. 

To order, just click one of the blue links above and follow the prompts.

The Cortese family produces about 65 thousand bottles of wine per year, eight thousand of which are Barbera Morassina.

Here’s the Cortese estate on the map of northwestern Italy.

I’d look to pair the Barbera Morassina with a meat-based stew, or a dish with braised meat. One option from Piedmont would be rustida, a traditional pork stew. As I’ve stated previously, I also like to think of this Barbera as a wine for gourmet burgers

Wines purchased through Open Tuesday will be sent directly from Italy, by air, in a temperature controlled environment. No hot warehouses, and no retail shelves.

Happy Tuesday,

Chris

If you have any questions or feedback, please email us: [email protected].  

Receive a $25 credit for every referred member after the purchase of their first bottle.

How it works: 

After clicking one of the links above, you’ll be able to request 1-12 bottles. Actually, that’s all you have to do!

About a week later, when we close the offer, you’ll get an email confirming how many bottles we allocated to your account. We will charge you when the wines are allocated.

We’ll do our best to allocate all the bottles you request. When there are more requests than bottles available, we’ll allocate one bottle to all requesting members before allocating a second bottle to anyone. We want as many members as possible to try these wines.

This is the 12th offer of our 2024 fall season. In September and October, we’ll send 16-18 wine offers to Open Tuesday list members.

We ship in increments of 12. If you don’t have an increment of 12 at the end of this fall season, we can hold your wines until the spring offer season.

Wines offered in the fall will ship in November for $5 per bottle (if you have an increment of 12.) This is about the same as the price to ship coast-to-coast within the U.S. – but our wines come directly from Italy.

Once your payment method is on file, you can make future requests with just a few clicks from the offer email. If you don’t have a card on file, you can add one during your first order. Your personal financial information is protected by Stripe.

Chris MacLean

Rob Genova

Open Tuesday Wines S.r.l.s.