Panevino Is de fundu 'e muru '09

c. €25

As a foodstuff bread is fairly consistently overrated.

I'll admit that there exists a pretty wide choice of breads, and that, of course, not all bread is created equal. You can get posh breads; with bits of stuff in it or on it, bread made using funny flour or yeast, crafted into odd shapes, or cooked in special ovens. And this diversity means that it is one of few foods that can happily play its part in all three of the days meals.

But it's never really the star of the show. Its role is one of deliverance. It is a pusher of peanut butter, an enabler of escargots.

Strange I always think then that there are entire shops dedicated to it, people whose whole profession is 'baker', and that it is frequently mentioned by restaurant reviewers.

Our man at Panevino started out life as a 'baker' before moving on to winemaking, and it's clearly left a bit of a chip on his shoulder. If I was being kind I would describe him as "rude". At the end of a rather Socratic 30-minuite questioning session I finally managed to extract the following information:

Hail hit the crop in 2009 and so, rather than using grapes from different plots to make a number of cuvees in different styles as he normally would, he instead put all the grapes for his red wines together and vinified them in very slightly different ways. Six wines were made, each named afer the place in the cellar where the barrel was. They all mean things like 'the one in the middle' or 'the one at the front'.

Recourse to an online translation service suggests Is de Fundu e Muru was at the base of a wall. The grapes are field blend, mostly Cannonau (aka Grenache), and load of others that he's never bothered zetting.

Thin-skinned grenache gives a light colour, violets and oranges on the nose on a light leather and spice base. In the mouth concentration hits. Sweet berries, more leather, sappy fruit, brighter cherries and very light, fine tannins. There's lots here, and it demands attention.

Better than all bread, and most wine.