Only in the Good Years

The label carries a number. Of 6,985 bottles made, this was number 566.

Three Vineyards, One Wine

Aldo Conterno built his own estate in the Bussia of Monforte d’Alba, and Granbussia is its summit. It is not made every year. The wine is a blend of three vineyards — Romirasco at the core, roughly three quarters of it, with Cicala and Colonnello alongside — and each of those three is also bottled on its own. The estate takes vineyards that sell perfectly well as single cuvées and, in the best years only, folds them into one riserva.

1982 is spoken of as a slightly unusual blend, with a little more Colonnello than usual, and at the same time as one of the great Granbussias. The wine is built for a long wait: it spends years in the cellar before bottling and more before release.

The Year

September 1982 in Piedmont was exceptionally hot, a couple of degrees above the norm. The grapes came in healthy and early. The wines were generous and round, and because the acidity was on the low side they were approachable young. That is the reason surviving 1982s vary so much from bottle to bottle today. A wine with the structure of Granbussia had the best chance of coming through intact.

Forty-Four Years On

This bottle had come through. The colour was still a deep garnet, brick at the edge, and not at all thin for Nebbiolo of this age. The nose opened on black cherry and dark chocolate, then game, forest floor and tar. With time in the glass a fennel-like spice came up, and a trace of toasted oak behind it.

On the palate it was full-bodied and deep. The roundness of 1982 was there, that soft flesh in the middle, but the tannin closed firmly at the end and left grip on the finish. That is the mark of a wine that still has shape, not the loose ease of one that has given up.

Forty-four years on, and the impression was that there was still more to come. That is a statement about this bottle, not about every bottle of 1982 — which is exactly the point with a vintage like this.

It was the other Barolo of an Italian evening that ran from the Rare 1988 and the Ornellaia Bianco 2013 through the Roagna Crichët Pajé 1982 to the Cappellano Otin Fiorin Franco 1995. Two 1982 Piedmont reds in one night, and neither of them tired.