I had a taste of a 1999 Oddero Barolo at an in store tasting yesterday. I mostly drink French and am not very knowledgable on Italian, but I’ve been trying to branch out a little recently. My quesiton is: is 15 year old Barolo really that brown??
When the taste was poured I was totally taken aback by the brown color. I’m not talking about some brown/orange bricking around the edge. I’m talking about straight out of a mud pit brown. I was also not expecting the raisiny, port like smell that I got. Is this all typical of a Barolo at this age?
I am sure many people here will say the bottle is damaged or unrepresentative. i haven’t had that Oddero, but it sounds more like Madeira than Barolo, which (to me) does trend toward brown-walnut in the red spectrum with age. How did it taste?
Honestly, I was not impressed. Almost no fruit whatsoever. It did have the tar and spice usually associated with nebbiolo, but thats about it. Everything tasted kind of muted and dead. So thats why I’m curious if the color and smell is indicative of poor storage or of being over the hill.
I also tasted a 1996 Oddero Barolo Roche di Castiglione next to it. This was much, much better. Really nice flowers (violets, roses), red fruits, spice (asian five spice?). Lively, structured. Color showed some age, but nowhere even close to the brown color on the 1999.
I would just be suprised if a reputable store would serve tastings of clearly damaged wines. Thats why I’m questioning my assesment of the 1999.
If coming from mainly Bordeaux, then the colour of (even quite immature) Barolo can shock. You can see orange at the rim even on release for some wines. That said if it was brown at the core, then chances are it could be cork failure. Oddero may not be top-flight, but I have found them decent agers and a 1999 normale should be in a good place to drink - not pushing up daisies.
Sounds like a bad bottle. Barolo, and particularly older Barolo, has a different color and overall appearance than most other red wines, but muddy brown isn’t it if it’s a good bottle.
Thanks for the responses. It seems like the consensus is cooked, which makes sense based on what I experienced.
Which leads me to my next question, how could a reputable store serve something that was so ergregiously flawed? If I, as someone who is largely unfamiliar with Barolo, can notice such a flaw, why didn’t whoever was pouring it?
I do not know exactly who was pouring, but it did not seem to me like he was an uniformed store employee. Based on his knowledge of the wine, I would think he was more likely an employee of a distributor or something. I’m not trying to point fingers or anything, I’m just suprised it happened.
I’ve been served conspicuously corked bottles by distributors and wine bars, and badly, badly oxidized wines by (Long Island) wineries. It all depends on who’s opening the bottle and whether they know what they’re doing – and whether they bother to smell or taste each bottle they open.
Sounds like a prematurely oxidized bottle, which can be caused by bad storage or just a bad cork (I’m convinced we lose at least as much wine to cork failure as we do to TCA).
Or the lighting in the tasting area could be fluorescent, which totally throws off wine color. Hard to believe but I’ve seen a few places that don’t understand this.
Oliver
I fully agree on the reality of pure cork failure. It seems common here to assume this is due to bad storage / heat damage, but even wine in ideal cellars it happens.