TN: 43 Barolos from 2013 -- and a very dry mouth to show for it

Chambers Street teamed up with Jancis Robinson to sponsor a tasting of 43 Barolos from 2013 tonight at the Tribeca Grill. This was perhaps the best walk-around events I’ve ever been to – lots of wine, no need to elbow your way in, more than two and a half hours to taste, with good nibbles. Certainly a great bargain at $150 including food.

The payoff of events like this is you get a feel for overall vintage. The drawback is that 43 young Barolos take a toll on the palate, and in this setting, it’s hard to see how a wine evolves in the glass, and it’s hard to take notes. It definitely paid to retaste with a refreshed palate. Also, bottles that had been open a bit often showed better than freshly opened ones.

The best wines showed richness but great structure. A few showed some heat and VA. If the danger in 2012 was wines that were underripe and lacking in concentration, the risk in 2013 seems to be in the other direction.

The wines from Verduno and La Morra seemed to show better at this stage. Those areas tend to produce more approachable wines. But perhaps they were favored in 2013.

The wines were selected by Walter Speller, Robinson’s delightfully opinionated Italian specialist, and were provided by the Enoteca Regionale di Barolo. It was a good selection of producers but didn’t include any trophy wines.

My scores are conservative because most these wines are tough sledding at the moment – tight and tannic. Greg dal Piaz, who was there, said these were much more forthcoming when he tasted them in May.

Wines I particularly liked – most of them tasted at least twice over several hours:

Burlotto - Acclivi (a blend of their Verduno vineyards): fabulous floral nose, spicy, elegant; a good poor man’s substitute for the unobtainable Monvigliero. 92-ish for me

Oddero - Barolo (a blend of some pretty good vineyards where they don’t have enough vines to bottle a cru): Lovely, fruity, very approachable – less tannic than some. 90-ish.

Vajra - Bricco delle Viole: Quite taut on the first pour, but lots of fruit concentration underneath. Retrying it later there were intense floral notes on the nose. 92-ish.

Scarzello - Vigna Merenda - Sarmassa: Hard tannins at first, but this opened up. Returning near the end this was rich, ripe, full of fruit but with boatloads of structure. Greg d P was oohing and ahing over this. I agree. Old fashioned in the best sense. 92+ -ish.

Cogno - Ravera: Lots of concentration of fruit here, plus structure. 91-ish.

Cavalloto - Bricco Boschi: Outstanding! Focused, concentrated, with lots of fruit and grip. My wine of the evening. 93++ ish

Rivetto - Serralunga d’Alba: A producer I’m unfamiliar with, but this showed very well. Perfumed – sort of unusual for Serralunga. “Elegant with lots of grip,” I wrote. 91-ish.

Luigi Baudana - Cerretta (owned by Vajra): I’ve liked these wines since I first tasted them at Vajra in 2011. This is real Serralunga: dense, tannic, concentrated. But there’s a long, rich, fruit-filled finish. I wrote 91, but that’s probably stingy.

The tasting certainly confirmed my preference for the traditionalists. Some of the modern-style wines I wasn’t keen on:

Scavino - Monvigliero: rich, balanced, but without any detail; kind of muddy flavors; certainly no Monvigliero terroir speaking here
Silvio Grasso - Bricco Manzoni: dominated by oak, with oak tannins to boot
Conterno-Fantino - Sori Ginestra: hot, alcohol scents, also hot on the palate. Later some shoe polish VA showed up. Wood tannins at the back.
Parusso - Bussia: very odd vegetal nose; later this seemed like green oak, and there was a marked oaky taste
Prunotto - Bussia: strangely pale hue – almost rose like. This was particularly odd in a modern style wine. Some oak on the nose and in the mouth. This just didn’t seem like cru bottling quality.

Great notes, John. Thanks for posting so soon after the tasting.

Thank you for the impressions. Tasting 43 barolos sounds like insanity, but the good kind of insane. Do you have a sense for how the vintage might compare similarly to past vintages? Were any of Fratelli Alessandria’s barolos poured? If Verduno might have done particularly well in 2013, their wines may be of particular nterest to me.

Thanks for the notes! I find barolos really hard to understand when young. When at tastings I tend to pick the modern style ( fruit forward, easy) when I know don’t like that style when aged 10-20 yrs. I simply don’t have the decades of knowledge to know that what to look for in young barolos that allow them to transform into the marvelous aged classic barolos I love.

Thanks for sharing John, much appreciated.

Yes. That seems to be my problem as well. I have a number of older Barolo (i?) that are in the modern style that I am not sure I like anymore…

Thanks for your impressions John.

Incidentally, I opened a bottle of 2013 Conterno-Fantino - Sori Ginestra few hours ago and I am drinking it at the moment. I do not get any heat or VA ( I am very sensitive to both). FWIW, I am drinking from a Zalto Burgundy glass. Wine not decanted but left to open up in the glass over few hours. There are tannins on the back palate which I thought were fruit tannins before reading your report. But there is beautiful fruit and the wine has intensity to match the tannins which I do not think are overwhelming. NB: I do not have much experience with this producer or his style. I have tasted Conterno-Fantino few times but is the first time I have actually purchased his wines. I will leave a half bottle for tasting tomorrow.

Last week I opened a 2013 Produttori Normale and the first bootle did not look good at all. I could pin point the exact flaw but it just was not there. So I opened a second bottle few days later and it was beautiful. So I guess there is some bottle variation to be expected.

Great notes, John! I attended a similar (incredibly, much bigger) 2012 event. I didn’t detect any under ripeness. The Serralunga/Monforte wines were definitely the highlight for me: complex and delightful as apposed to the more gloopy, sweet La Morra and to a lesser degree, Barolo commune wines. 2013 wines may be ‘better’, but the SE commune’s wines were good enough for me.

Thanks for the data points on some of my favorites – Burlotto, Vajra, Cavallotto, Cogno.

Scarzello and Rivetto are new names for me. Will have to check them out.

Speller said this was the post-2010 vintage to buy, and that seems right. I liked the '12s quite a bit for their elegance and aromatics, but the '13s are more concentrated and riper. They seem much better structured than the '11s, many of which I found deficient in acid.

Sadly, there were no Fratelli Alessandria wines. I’d hoped to try them. The Castello di Verduno Massara was poured, though. I wrote: “Lovely, elegant, spicy,” and put it around 90 points.

Again: My point scores need to be taken with a grain of salt since there was no chance to coax things out of the glass over time.

Interestingly, the modern wines here were not necessarily the most fruit-forward. The most approachable wines were probably the Burlotto Acclivi and the Oddero normale. Most of the barriqued wines showed some oak flavors and aromas, and a numbers seemed to have harsh oak tannins. Of course, this is just one moment in these wines’ lives. Greg said the '13s generally were more open and fruity when he tasted them in May. (Jamie Wolfe of Chambers Street said the wines had been shipped two weeks ahead. Some might still be suffering a little travel shock.)

It is hard to judge serious nebbiolo young because of the ferocious tannin. As Speller said, you need to try to look for the fruit concentration and balance. I’ve been visiting the region since 1996 and have drunk a fair number of young Barolos here in the US, but I still find these harder to assess young than wines from other regions of the world.

The VA was on the second pass through. It wasn’t anywhere near the point of saying the bottle was spoiled; just at that level you sometimes get because of Barolo’s alcohol levels and time in wood. It was of the shoe polish type, which I can take only in very small doses. The room and wine were probably in the mid-70s by that point, which might make it more conspicuous. Or maybe that bottle had a cork that allowed in too much air.

FYI, according to the cantina website, the techniques are pretty modern. The Sori Ginestra has a relatively short maceration (8-15 days) in “horizontal fermenters” (which I assume means roto-fermenters) and it spends two years in French oak. I haven’t tasted their wines all that often. I remember a couple over the years seeming fairly oaky, but sometimes that worked for me.

I can’t recall any '12s that were underripe for my palate – I liked many of them a lot for earlier drinking – but I think some people reacted to some of the wines that way. I was just trying to convey where '12 and '13 lie on the style/ripeness scale relative to each other.

Great notes John, what an event! was planning on attending but ended up being away from city.

And thanks for explaining what to look for in young non-modern wines! I always find it hard to taste past those rough tannin.

Thanks for the notes John. Those Cavallotto wines usually show well young.

Did you taste any Silvano Bolmida Bussia, John? Not a trophy wine so maybe it was available?

I’m afraid I didn’t. I skipped two or three in the interests of palate preservation, and I think a friend there said that one was skippable.

Surprised more didn’t show this, as B&B begins at 14% alcohol…

Yes, I found the alcohol stands out on some '07s and '11s, in particular, but there were only a handful last night that showed heat for me. And I’m generally pretty sensitive to high alcohols.