I know, I know, the bottle’s a regrettable electric purple color – no respectable wine should look like this – but I’ll forgive an awful lot of bad taste in packaging if the result is good-tasting wine, and the latest Five Star Nick’s Wine of the Week, the Luna di Luna Sangiovese/Merlot 2009 is most definitely a good-tasting wine. Moreover, at $10 a bottle, it’s a terrific bargain.

But perhaps this is not meant to be a “respectable” – read traditional, stuffy, intimidating – wine. Perhaps it’s meant to be fun and unpretentious, intended to lure twenty-somethings away from their designer-driven vodkas and tequilas with similarly eye-catching packing.

And if it is, I wish the producers luck because it is a delightful wine. The secret here is, if you start with good, low-yield fruit and then do as little to it in the winery as possible – what’s called non-interventionist winemaking – and refrain from smothering the wine with layers of oak from aging in new barrels, you find that the lovely fresh-fruit flavors of the unadulterated grapes shine through.

Sangiovese is a most appealing varietal, able to show a red-fruit zip along with am appealing rusticality but it sometimes lacks gravitas when bottled alone. This is where the merlot comes in, adding a touch of polish to the exuberance of the sangiovese, and the combination results in an everyday wine of immense charm, especially considering it’s easy price tag.

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