My information was confirmed by Aldo Vacca. And as John said, if you know Aldo, you can’t think of him as anything but a straight shooter.
Also, if you read the code and think about the story behind this, it is clear that 9.105 is one of the earliest bottlings, so it would not have any so-called riserva juice in it.
I do think this whole chase is somewhat overrated. The goal in making the cru bottlings is to represent the crus. The base bottling is not merely the wine that did not go into the cru bottlings. It is intended to be their flagship bottling. The most common reason for not bottling the crus is to keep up the high quality of the base bottling. Note that they have significant vines in a number of other crus that they don’t ever bottle separately, e.g. Basarin, Bordini, Micca, Cole, Cottà, Faset, Gaia Principe, Gallina, Marcarini, Meruzzano, Montaribaldi, Pajorè, Roncagliette, San Cristoforo, Secondine, Tre Stelle, and Vicenziana. These all go into the base bottling or the Langhe Nebbiolo. The Langhe Nebbiolo might be the greatest value since it is alwasy 100% Barbaresco grapes. (They don’t own any others.)
Still, it would be great fun to collect a bunch of different bottlings of this wine and do a blind tasting.
It would be very interesting. I wouldn’t be surprised if you couldn’t tell the difference. One of the reasons to not produce the riservas is if there isn’t enough of a difference between the single vineyards to make it worth bottling them separately.
In this case, though, I recall that Vacca said the decision was made based on backed up inventory of the crus from prior vintages. And, as I said above, that isn’t so surprising since it was 2009, the years that wine sales cratered with the financial crisis.
Still, the vintage choices are puzzling sometimes: You can understand why they didn’t bottle them in difficult years like 2002 and 2003, and Vacca told me in the early 2000s that they skipped 1998 because not all nine of the crus were of riserva quality that year. But they bottled the crus in 97, 2000 and 07, and skipped arguably stronger vintages like 2006 and 2010.
Aldo told me that he felt that, while 2010 was a very strong vintage in Barolo, it was much less so in Barbaresco, esp. in their vineyards. It had something to do with soils and rain and drainage, but I forget the details. It is curious that this was also one of the 2 years in recent times that Giacosa made no Barbaresco.
Gray, who shared the lot 9.105 with me last week, served the lot 9.097 blindly tonight in a group setting. It was very nice, but it didn’t show as well as the 9.105. It wasn’t decanted as long and the foods were all wrong for a wine this tannic and acidic. Food aside, it didn’t have the oomph of the 9.105 we had last week – neither the power on the nose nor the concentration on the mid-palate. Perhaps more air and it would have fleshed out more. It certainly would have been better with red meats or mushroom something (or the lamb sausage pizza we had with the 9.105) than the motley array of cheeses on the table when this was served. As it was, I gave it ~90-ish so long as I kept it away from the cheese.
I guess you haven’t clicked through to Ken’s site. He says that starting with lot 9.120 (bottled on the 120th day of 2009), there was 30% riserva fruit blended in. Both of the lots I’ve tasted were before that point.
Whether 9.097 and 9.105 were in one batch blended for uniformity and simply bottled on different dates, or whether there were different batches within Batch 1 above, don’t know. These two bottles/lots certainly showed differently. As I said, the bottle tonight was decanted for only a short period and the food pairing was terrible. That may account for the different showings.
(A word to the wise: Don’t ever serve Wensleydale with orange and chocolate with red wines.)
