1999 Paolo Scavino Barolo - Italy, Piedmont, Langhe, Barolo (2/23/2018)
Drink up. This is fading fast, though given the confected flavors, I am not sure it ever had a prime time. Sad that Barolo would be turned into a caricature with no capability to mature into something complex and interesting.
Posted from CellarTracker
1998 and 1999 were the dark years at Scavino. I remember tasting the '98 at the cantina in 2002 and thinking it was awful – a muddy, murky mess. And I had been a big fan of theirs up to then.
They have dialed the use of Oak way back in recent years as many “Modernists” have. I believe I read that in 2013 their Barolo “Classico” was raised entirely in botti
I had a bottle of their '99 Carobric back in October and thought it was still drinking young.
Sounds like the dark years of John Morris, too. 
And I thought the 90 was oaked to kingdom come!
The Scavino website says the normale spends time in neutral French barrels, which would be smaller than botte. But you’re right – in the early 2000s, they shortened the time in barriques, and I think they also reduced the proportion of the wine that goes in barriques.
But I think it’s a mistake to focus just on the oak at Scavino. They have some kind of drying tunnel through which the grapes pass after harvest. Malolactic takes place in wood. I don’t know if they’re using rotofermenters, or what the maceration times are, or what the fermentation temperatures are. The website says little about the winemaking. But the resulting wines seem very far out on the modernist end of the scale.
Scavino is interesting. Ive had the 1982 Bric del Fiasc, and it is probably my favorite barolo to date, and no sign of oak. However, a 2004 BdF I had was clearly modern in style and I did not enjoy it. My understanding is they started using new french oak and rotofermenters in 1993, but that could be wrong. I have some bottles of the 1989 and am hoping that was before the shift.
So my two cents is I would happily drink the 80s era Scavino but I am not interested in anything newer. But I very much dislike oak in Nebbiolo.
Here’s what their East Coast importer, Skurnik, says about the winemaking:
In 1993, rotofermentors arrived at the estate, and between 1996-1999, Slavonian casks were replaced with French oak. But barriques were always and only used for the first 10 months of aging before the wines were transferred to larger oak botti. The percentage of new oak has been much reduced from a high of 30% in the 1990s to only 20% new from 2004 – 2008, and 17% new in 2011 and 2012. For the 2015 harvest, they have further reduced the percentage new to just 14%.
Here’s a photo from a 2013 blog posting by sometime-Berserker John Fodera:
Thanks for the correction