Strawberry compote, vanilla (oak?), primary red fruit aroma that continues through on the palate. Zippy acidity, and as a PnP the tannin is surprisingly gentle for a young nebbiolo. Long saline finish with a light touch of licorice. Enjoyable now if you’re looking for juicy fruit.
Thanks for the early look, sounds good. This is going for ~$25 in California, about what I paid for the 2014 Barbaresco!!!
Ya, the prices are slowly ratcheting up. I picked this up for $20. Its still one of the better values IMO. While the % increase is large, the dollar amount is relatively small.
It was only a matter of time before pricing caught up to quality. The wines are still values for what they are.
Has anyone heard anything about the 2018 vintage in Piedmont?
From what I’ve read, 2017 sucked. 2018 is good in that it is better than 2017. 2019 is being greeted with great excitement.
Huh. I tasted some samples of 2017s at the Produttori when I visited in summer 2018. They were very nice. Not legendary, but they certainly did not suck.
Not surprising from that producer. You have first hand knowledge right there. I have only read that it was a pretty awful year from a weather standpoint. But the same could be said about 2014 or 2015 depending on style preference and producer.
I can imagine Produttori’s pretty great no matter what, but as a whole, I haven’t been particularly enthusiastic about 2017 and what Chris said is something I’ve seen repeated many times. While some producers have managed to succeed, the overall style is very solar, ripe and fruit-driven. I really hope 2019 and 2020 would offer something more interesting.
AG has a great write up on this and why it’s not a bad vintage - though no classic either.
Hoping for less “solar” vintages in the era of climate change is often a fool’s errand. Good luck though.
That’s definitely true. However, that still doesn’t mean we wouldn’t see such vintages - they’ll be just more seldom.
Yes, and they were already getting rare, so…
Then he must have changed his mind.
"2017 – Hail, Frost & Heat…
Whereas 2016 was an extraordinarily benign year, pretty much anything that could happen did happen in 2017. A warm, dry winter led to early bud break. That, alone, would not have been a problem, but it left vines unusually vulnerable to a brutal hailstorm on April 15. The damages were especially severe in Neive, where a number of vineyards were practically wiped out. “Yields are down 60% for Barbera and 75-80% for Nebbiolo,” Claudia Cigliuti explained. As if that was not enough, Barbaresco was affected by the same late April frost that was an issue for other regions in Europe. Neive in particular was especially hard hit in the hillside that encompasses Basarin, Fausoni and Currà. “Hail wiped out 60% of the crop on the Basarin hillside, and frost took out the rest pretty much in the same spots,” Andrea Sottimano told me. “At that point, my dad and I decided the best thing to do was just prune the vines for the next year.” Whereas Dolcetto and Barbera can give some fruit from second generation buds, Nebbiolo is trickier because there is a risk the fruit won’t fully ripen, and the lower quality of that fruit is not worth the risk of compromising the next vintage. As readers will see in the producer commentaries, some growers did not bottle their Neive Barbarescos from the hardest hit sectors. Warm, dry weather resumed and carried through to harvest. Conditions in Piedmont often change around mid-August, when evening temperatures start to retreat, but that was not the case in 2017. Diurnal shifts during the last month of ripening are considered essential for the development of color, aromatics and full maturity of tannins, and that did not happen in 2017.
In tasting, the 2017s are light in both color and structure, which suggests that the shocks of 2017 were very hard, if not impossible, to overcome. Many 2017s are dried out, gritty and lacking in depth. Moreover, as is often the case in warmer years, vintage speaks more loudly than vineyard, because so much site detail is baked out by the heat. This report includes notes on some bottled 2017s, but I also tasted many more wines from cask that generally share these attributes. There will be some fine 2017 Barbarescos, but not many." - AG 11/07/19
It would seem so, from Feb 11, 2021 (edit: didn’t think it was fair to post his whole article so I truncated it):
Interesting. The first quote is about Barbaresco; the second quote is about Barolo. In the quote I posted, he specifically addressed weather conditions that were detrimental to the vintage. It is not as if those changed. I wonder if this is a case of the two regions having different conditions, such as in 2010 and 2014. However, he has already expressed high enthusiasm about the 2017 PdB normale. That said, there are numerous other sources that state that 2017 was a very difficult and even lousy vintage and that 2018 is considered a bit of a relief by contrast.
By the way, I saw the 2017 PdB normale at Costco for $37.99. So no price jump from 2016 at this point.
I got my half case at $35, but that source went up just above Costco pricing with the 2017. I’ll probably end up buying 1 or 2 to see how they compare. Really surprising that the 17 got the same score from AG as the 16.
I’ve been hearing that about 17 in general, but AG is the only source I pay for to get the in depth look. I’m generally pretty comfortable going off what he says - frankly I’m not storing a whole lot relative to other people here, so a vintage like 17 in Piedmont is one ill largely skip with a few minor exceptions.
I put my “2017” money into Willamette Valley. ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
Smart man, sadly I missed that train…
Who ya gonna call? Marcus Goodfellow!