Zero Otto Nove

A few nights ago, I had the chance to go “Zero Otto Nove” on Arthur Avenue. Deemed as one of the best Italian joints in Old Little Italy, the menu boasts great pastas, authentic brick oven pizzas and an extensive wine list. Although, because the restaurant is pretty upscale the cheapest wine is $20 bucks. And on my budget, you can bet your ass that’s the bottle I bought.

Caposaldo Pinot Grigio is a refreshing and versatile white wine – with the taste of the Italian hills in every glass, it is the perfect wine for weekday evenings and weekend gatherings. The flavor is elegant, medium bodied, with fresh aromas of apple and pear and clean, crisp palate followed by a minerally finish. You’re drunk if you think I wrote that, that’s just what it said on the bottle. 

I didn’t taste apple or pear and I certainly didn’t experience any “minerally” finish (minerally? is that a word? I swear these wine aficionados just use made up words to describe made up tastes). What I tasted was standard white wine and a nice happy medium between being too sweet and too bitter. I'm partial to white wine, mostly because it’s chilled (I had to put ice in my glass of red later in the dinner, what an amateur!) and overall, this white wine met my expectations. 

For dinner, I ate a pizza with spicy sopressata as the main topping and if you never tried that particular meat, do it, it's delicious. The wine went fairly well with the spicy "za", but not as well as it did with the garlic bread dredged in olive oil. In the end, the only real problem was that the restaurant charged $20 and online it goes for about 8 bucks. Even more of a problem when my party of twelve were handed a bill of $328 (**excluding tip). Guess I'm eating White Castle and going with boxed wine and malt liquor for a few weeks.

*Editor's Note: It sounds like Nik enjoyed this bottle so I'll give it a 8/10 grade for him.