a fine wine tasting archive
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Granbussia is the wine Aldo Conterno made only when the year deserved it: three vineyards the estate bottles separately, combined into one riserva. 1982 is counted among the greatest of them. Forty-four years on, this bottle still had grip at the finish.
Before the label said Piè Franco it said only Franco, for three vintages. This is the second of them: ungrafted Nebbiolo from the Gabutti parcel that Teobaldo Cappellano planted when everyone told him the phylloxera would take it. Thirty-one years on, the wine was wide open and still had something in reserve.
The label on Roagna's 1982 Crichët Pajé says Vino da Tavola, the lowest rung of the Italian system. Inside was a forty-four-year-old Barbaresco from one of the slowest cellars in Piedmont — brick at the rim, balsamic and dried rose on the nose, and a core of fruit that had not gone anywhere.
For fifteen vintages this classic bottling was the only Barbaresco DOCG Gaja made — the single-vineyard wines had been voluntarily demoted to Langhe. At twenty years, the 2001 showed why the house never needed more than this.
Bruno Giacosa put a red label on a Barolo only in the years he judged worth it. The 2000 Riserva from Le Rocche del Falletto, in magnum, opened at twenty years — delicate for a hot vintage, and unmistakably the work of the man who owned the hill.
The house that makes Monprivato treats its Barbera exactly the same way it treats its Barolo — old Slavonian casks, nothing else. From a shield-shaped vineyard in Monforte, in a vintage the Langhe still talks about.
Two hailstorms took the Parussi vineyard in 2014 and Massolino simply did not bottle it. What was left came into the straight Serralunga Barolo, and in a half bottle six years later it looked like Barolo from an older decade.