After an assortment of Piedmont producers came through town this past week, it seemed like a good time to find something a little more mature than 13 Oddero, Vajra or 14 Scavino to enjoy with dinner.
Whipped up a creamy pasta with chicken and grated gruyere, and popped this.
Very good from the outset. Structurally, plenty of acidity, but the tannins are starting to melt into the wine. They flex towards the end of a sip, but they aren’t clamping down on the other, very tasty components of the wine.
Aromatically, there’s a little bit of medicine, dried and fresh herbs, blackberry, anise and maybe just hint of alcoholic heat. A hint of Chinato?
Plush and rich as it hits the mouth. Lots of blackberry and black cherry fruit. The tannins flex midpalate, but not in a drying or overtly muscular way. Tar and anise woven in with the fruit. Very long finish. This leaves beautiful dark fruit and smoke behind. Really builds to a crescendo. The structure of the wine makes for a taut middle that builds to a very pretty finish. A “chewy” wine in a good way.
This is in a very good place now - moving into both “approachable” and “enjoyable,” but no rush at all.
Great tasting note. Made me crave some nebbiolo. Looks like this producers has an agent bring wine here locally. I’ll have to see if I can track down some, and hopefully from 2016.
Well, i will have my first aged Barbaresco tomorrow saturday April 8, it will be Sori Paitin Barbaresco but in 1988 vintage , so am exited to see if it just flows or maybe already is over the top. I am prepared that it might be over its prime. And as i didn’t pay too much it will be okay if it doesn’t perform. But will be an education for myself I will try to report back how it went.
Well. Had the wine on saturday , opend the bottle 3 hours before i wanted to drink the wine and poured some in my Zalto Burgundy glass. The note were , soy sauce - teriyaki - well tasted it and feared the worst but it showed the same notes plus som sour cherry. in the evening i had a 2 glasses more and it didn’t get better or worse , but i think its at its absolute end of life. The day after it was dead. Interesting to taste and i am also aware that the producer / wine is not one where you can expect it do be great , at least how i think. Maybe some of you experienced guys can chime in with more !
Paitin has been an excellent Barbaresco producer for decades and the vineyard (Serraboella) is one of the very best in the region. 1988 was a “very good” vintage that produced plenty of very enjoyable wines. At 35 years it should have still been good, but might have been pushing the limits. Too bad.
Thanks Chris , good to know. I bought the wine at auction so also not sure how it has been stored , the price i paid for it was 40 USD so not a disaster as i was also prepared that the wine was maybe gone bad. But good to hear thoughts from people with more knowledge than i have on older wines.
FYI, they were using barriques pretty heavily in the 90s (they were represented by Marco de Grazia at the time), but when the son, Luca, took over, they reverted to traditional methods – in the mid-2000s, I think. I don’t know if they had adopted barriques by 1988.
Not the same wine, but FWIW, a 2005 Sori Paitin, not VV, tasted earlier this year was still fairly tannic. I noted it was a bit modern and polished which could have been some of the lingering effect of new wood since, as John mentions, they were transitioning from an overtly modern approach during that period of time. I thought the wine was enjoyable and still had plenty of life left, even if it wasn’t terribly exciting.
I had the same wine with the same impressions. I am going to ignore my remaining bottles for 5-10 years in the hope they will amount to something better.
I have a couple of bottles of the '96 I bought at the winery in 2000 that I’ve hesitated to open, given the nature of the vintage.
I don’t have my notes with me, but Luca spoke at Flatiron Wines in NY earlier this year and indicated that it took a fair deal of lobbying to convince his father to move away from barriques, so there may well have been an extended transition.
Do you happen to know the start and end date of the barrique era? I know I had some late 80s/ early 90s that did not seem modern as has also been the case with 2008s.
This detailed article (link), which appears to have been carefully reported, says they only used barriques between 1999 and 2001 – and may well be the source of the second date range in the Google answer. (1999 would have been a fairly late date to adopt barriques given that they were in the De Grazia portfolio throughout the 1990s.)
Thanks. That is interesting since both @Michae1_P0wers and I found the 2005 to have odd, hard green tannins that suggested new wood in Nebbiolo. Perhaps it was the result of newer botti?
I found that several of the ‘21s that Luca poured had very hard tannins. (Again, I don’t have my notes at hand, so I don’t recall which ones.) But I see from my calendar that he spoke a year ago, in November 2024, so perhaps that was at an awkward point, shortly after release. Other producers’ '21s I’ve had this fall haven’t shown that way.
I’d be curious to try some other Paitin wines from the last 15 years to see if the tannins evolve.
I have drank 2008, 2010, and 2014 Serraboella (AKA Serra?) as younger wines (6-12 yrs) and found them all lighter and approachable. I have actually treated them as Nebbiolo cellar defenders. I think this one leans less formidable than the Sori Paitin.
I believe 2005 is a fairly tannic vintage generally, so that could be a part of it. It’s been ten months now and I don’t remember too much about the wine except from my note, which reads that the wine was quite tannic, without any reference to wood. I also noted that the wine held up over 48 hours and that it should continue to age well. I neither recorded nor recall thinking that the fruit was gone but thought it could certainly continue to age.
I will try to report back how it went.
