Barolo & Barbaresco
Reviewed by Joshua Greene
December 2001,
Last year, tasting wines at the Salone del Gusto in Piedmont,
many of the new Barolos seemed flashy and modern. Then I went to visit
Ceretto. Bruno and Marcello Ceretto had been the innovators in Barolo
during my early years as a wine writer, and their most recent releases,
the '96 and '97 wines, have been showing beautifully in our tastings
(W&S 12/00 and 10/01). A visit only reconfirmed the stature of
their work. The Ceretto style has become an established benchmark,
as has that of Gaja, Giacosa, Conterno. But now, new names and completely
new styles have shifted the ground under those benchmarks, leaving
chaos in their wake. Or so it seemed at our latest round of Barolo
and Barbaresco tastings for this issue. The ground has shifted, and
I, for one, am confused.
Tom Maresca, who spends a lot more time in Piedmont than most wine
writers we know, is also confused. "There's an analogy with the
situation in Burgundy," he says, "when many small growers
there started bottling their own wines. There was a similar confusion
for consumers until the situation normalized. In addition to the cru
variations from site to site, you also have variations in style. You
have people making wine for the first time in '95 and '96, a real
explosion of producers. It's stretching the resources of a small zone
pretty thin." As Maresca points out in his current assessment
of the state of play there, this shift to growers bottling their own
wines comes at a time when there's also been a dramatic shift in the
vineyards. What some growers consider a climate change has brought
consistent and sometimes extreme ripeness to nebbiolo in the latest
vintages. Combine that with more new plantings of international varieties
(cabernet, merlot, syrah, all still illicit additions to a DOCG wine,
though there are a lot of wines in this tasting that don't taste like
pure nebbiolo), and there's a paradigm shift.
Sergio
Esposito, proprietor of Italian
Wine Merchants in New York where many of these new wines line
the shelves, finds the market split. "New people are buying the
new names - they're usually finding out about them in restaurants.
Another market follows the traditional, well established names."
He sees a lot of new buyers attracted to the more accessible style
of the '97 vintage, though he far prefers the '96. "One of the
best vintages in the last twenty years, '96 compares with '82 and
'89. The '97s will turn out a lot like the '90s, both hot vintages
which produced wines with a lot of sugar - the grapes matured early,
boasting of alcohol and beautiful fruit. But with nebbiolo the hang
time is very important: the later you pick it the better it is. The
tannins need to develop very slowly, and if you have too much heat
up front, it stops that process." Both '96 and '89 were slower-maturing
vintages, and Esposito believes the wines will be significantly longer-lived
- he already finds a number of the '90s on their way out. We found
great wines in both vintages, though the best of the tasting were
'96s, three stand-outs from Rocche dei Manzoni: These are great wines,
and no matter how modern, fresh and clean, there's nothing confusing
about them.
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