Get together for Gaja wines

Eunkyung, Yoonjun, I thought that we could drink two great wines from one of the most well known producers in Piedmont, Gaja (Pronounced as Ga-Ya). Please read below comments about Gaja and its wines. Thanks, again, Yoonjun/Eunkyung for this wine.

Karen MacNeil, wine cretic, says the white wine (Chardonnay) is one of the voluptuous Chardonnays. I am guessing it would go well with light or creamy cheese, chicken, etc. The Barbaresco will go well with pasta or risotto with mushroom and stakes. We are planning to make some pasta.

2020 Gaja Gaia & Rey Chardonnay

  • Location: Langhe, Piedmont, Italy

  • Comments: 100% Chardonnay .

  • “Piedmont is so profoundly associated with Barolo and Barbaresco that it’s a bit startling to find one of the world’s most voluptuous Chardonnays here. But that indeed is what “Gaia & Rey” is—a glamorous, larger-than-life Chardonnay that, on a table full of other wines, immediately becomes the center of attention, drowning your palate in creamy, nutty, briochey opulence. Dynamic and ambitious, Angelo Gaja established his early reputation on his Barbarescos and then his Barolos. In the process, he became something of a Piedmontese legend, traveling the world and talking about Piedmont wines to every journalist and restaurateur who would listen (and making converts of most of them). His wines—as this Chardonnay attests—can have spellbinding intensity and power. The best seem virtually unreal in their ability to be massively opulent, structured, and yet finely etched at the same time. They are also gaspingly expensive. (Karen MacNeil, Wine Bible)”

  • Question: How is this different from other Chardonnay you tasted before? What is unique? Would you justify the price?

  • Producer website (I dare you to open this website)

2019 Gaja Barbaresco

  • Location: Barbaresco, Langhe, Piedmont, Italy

  • Comments: 100% Nebbiolo.

  • “Angelo Gaja makes a number of stunning Piedmontese wines (see my description of Gaja’s Chardonnay), but the heart and soul of the Gaja winery are his Barbarescos. They are always richly flavored wines, although those flavors usually sit inside a locked box of tannin, and you get the key only after you’ve aged the wines for several years. Gaja’s “regular” Barbaresco is often my favorite—a wine with beautiful licorice, cherry, vanilla, fig, and earthy notes, and a seductive sense of umami. Gaja’s top Barbaresco (for which you will have to hock the family jewels) is the single-vineyard Sorì Tildìn, which is massive and unyielding when young but with age reveals its sensual side along with a torrent of compelling aromas and flavors. Gaja wines always require two things: patience and money. (Karen, MacNeil, Wine Bible)”

  • Question: What do you like about this wine? What other grapes or region of mind can be compared with this?