For my bday in April i plan to open a Monfortino (among other wines off course)
As my experience is zero with this wine, which one?
2000, 2001, 2002, 2008?
Or should i wait because it is 20 years too early?
I’ve had the 2000, 2002, and 2008 recently.
The style of Monfortino changed a lot over that time period. The 2000 is a very good, but rustic (in comparison to the 2008) wine in my experience. A perfect bottle will probably improve for another 5-10 years, but it is definitely approachable.
The '02 is an epic wine, super dense and concentrated, which is hard to believe for the vintage of course. I think it is very enjoyable now, but I think it will continue to evolve in a positive way for a long time, and maybe the best bottles will be 10-20 years down the line.
The '08 is much closer to the wines Roberto is making today, and the '08 vintage is also a unique one. The combination of improvement in winemaking + the vintage means the '08 is probably going to be the most finessed of these three in the tannins. It has the typical Monfortino flavor profile but also some more exotic citrus like fruit in my opinion because of the vintage. It’s absolutely approachable now in my opinion, although it will probably get better.
So I don’t know about the '01, but I’d happily drink any three of these wines today especially if you have multiple bottles. The best of the three for today’s drinking may actually be the '08.
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Thanks a lot Rob. 08 is a possibility, certainly
The only time is now and who knows what may happen in the future to you!
I’ve had the 01 and it was part of a wider tasting. It seemed pretty open, if on the youthful side, for me. The 02 should also be very giving right now and would likely be worth opening too
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Celebrate your birthday. Don’t wait. I haven’t had any of those particular vintages, but I tasted the 06 in 2018 at a wine shop in Barolo and it was incredible. Only 12 years old, but it was hard to imagine that it could be any better.
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I’ve tried most vintages of Monfortino going back 35-40 years and the 2002 is THE most extraordinary wine IMHO - I would drink this if I should choose. Enjoy
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Just had the '01 a couple of years ago and it was absolutely fabulous. A bit tight at first, but a decant woke it up. Best sips were a couple of hours later so I would definitely open it and decant a few hours early. Perfect provenance bottle drunk in Piemonte.
Echoing the 2002 suggestion. I can’t say I’ve tasted 30-40 vintages but I’ve had a decent mix going back as far as 1955 and agree 2002 is just epic. Yes you could savor it in a later life stage and it would be sublime, but I have to imagine it will give enormous pleasure now.
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Thanks for the valuable input. I am tempted to drink the 2002. A very special vintage
Will report back
Consider me a contrarian on the 2002, which I have always found to be monstrously extracted and drying…
You’re not the only one. I’ve had several over the years, starting with one very young, and they have always been unyielding and drying, even after more than 24 hours open, which happened because it was undrinkable for an entire evening and we ended up recorking it and going to bed, then trying it again the next day. I’ve always wanted it to be good, because the vintage was such a troublesome one and I like the idea of Monfortino being great in that context, but it hasn’t showed up for us.
I haven’t had the '08, but have enjoyed both the '00 and '01
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When have you last had it? First bottle of it I had was in early 2020, and I thought it was very impressive, but a bit gritty, and the tannin quality is definitely not at the level of where Conterno is today. Last bottle was two months ago and I think it has softened in that 4.5 year period, while the flavor profile of the wine remains a mix of vibrant sweet red fruit & a bunch of interesting savory, tertiary notes. In a world where I’m not confident most Barolo is aging well, it seems like a wine to me that’ll age for a few more decades.
I’ve had some bottle variation in the '02, whether it is just a consequence of different sources of the wine or actual bottle variation, I can’t say. The bottles I’ve had from Rare Wine Co including the last one a few months ago, and the bottle Galloni poured at the Monfortino dinner he did a year ago from a collector in Piedmont, were both very vibrant in my opinion.
Personally, I prefer the more modern Monfortino style although a winemaker in the area has told me he prefers the Monfortino from before Roberto was making them, and I can see an argument for that. The new vintages are more of a pure expression of fruit and maybe you lose some of the savory intrigue. The tannin quality has improved quite a bit I think, making the wines drinkable young. My favorite vintage is the 2010, and maybe the 2014 will come around and be even better, it certainly is silkier but I’ve found it closed off since release.
I think this is true for all of the Conterno wines. Roberto is making fruitier, jammier, more modern wines and to me they aren’t as interesting as they used to be. He has lots of fans, though, as evidenced by the high prices.
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The 19 from barrel was definitely a more modern and approachable style, more fruit forward, but was still stunning and layered. But different people prefer different styles so there’s definitely not going to be a one size concensus. I kind of like both styles.
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It was last February… I can understand that by a lot of metrics it’s inherently impressive, by virtue of its size, density and sheer opacity, but it has often struck me as an example of “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”.
Just commenting as a civilian here, as this is far from my specialist region, even if I do follow with interest; but I would wonder whether physiological maturity (i.e. ripe tannins) and analytical maturity (i.e. sugar levels) are entirely coordinated chez Conterno. This all gets back to viticulture, but would potentially explain why one has to accept jammier flavors and higher abvs in order to get suppler, suaver tannins.
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That’s an interesting point. Frankly, it would be great to have a reviewer of wines from Barolo offering a bit more technical analysis of the winemaking techniques etc. There certainly are massive style differences in producers that, on a list on a piece of paper, would all sit in the “traditional” school of Barolo. My wife significantly prefers Giuseppe Rinaldi, Burlotto, and Roagna over Conterno and I can totally understand why. In the same vintage, at least per the labels, Rinaldi is getting to an alcohol level typically 1% below Conterno and the Rinaldi wines are shockingly light and ethereal, but at the same time very complex, and the fruit on the Rinaldi seems far more subdued to me than on the modern Conternos, but there’s still a beautiful sense of sweetness to the wine. I find the recent Rinaldi wines mesmerizing on release, but question their age worthiness.
In terms of tannins, the way I’ve thought about it is Rinaldi’s wines actually have remarkably smooth tannins that are hardly noticeable (to me, someone drinking nearly 100% Nebbiolo at least), while Conterno’s tannin quality is very good, but the tannins are much fiercer and just sort of buried by the sheer density of the wine.
I’ve started doing an annual side by side tasting of Monfortino vs. Rinaldi Brunate and some of these other more finessed producers (last year, threw a Giacosa into the mix) and it’s a fascinating tasting IMO.
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I think it’s probably a mistake to correlate age worthiness with perception of tannin, since the latter often has more to do with tannin quality than tannin quantity. Analytically, for example, contemporary Burgundy and Bordeaux generally has much more tannin in quantity than the wines of the 1980s and 1990s… yet those wines tasted more tannic young, because the tannins were coarser and extraction less selective (if you e.g. ferment hot, break the cap a lot, add extraction enzymes, do a heated post fermentation maceration, and then take lots of press wine, you will extract plenty of unripe tannins in addition to the ripe tannins that extract naturally without much in the way of intervention beyond a long maceration). And in any case, most wines will age well if bottled without appreciable dissolved oxygen under a high quality closure (admittedly, criteria that are not always met). Indeed, Conterno’s fastidiousness about corks is surely one reason why his wines generally age well.
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Very interesting comment! May I ask how tannins are measured and why quantity has grown (is it a function of climate change, viniculture, etc.)? I suppose higher tannin quantity correlates to a lot of your other posts over the years that suggest “just because a wine tastes better in youth, doesn’t mean it won’t age just as well as prior generations”.
They can be measured in a laboratory. The French use “IPT” (Indice de Polyphénols Totaux) quite a bit. You can get very different readings depending on how the samples are prepared, however.
Tannins are more abundantly present in, and extract more readily from, ripe fruit.
With over-ripeness, tannins begin to oxidize and degrade, so the concentration of available tannin, having risen with ripening, decreases again.
This is why wines made from ripe grapes last longer than wines made from under- or over-ripe grapes.
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Thank you for this little summarization @William_Kelley ! These are all bits of information that I believe I knew independently, but had had a hard time integrating into a logical sequence. Really appreciate how you involve yourself here, I almost always walk away with something new to think about. 
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