A,
What was the issue, oak, extraction, lack of varietal character, overripe, etc…? The fact I have some.of these concerns me a bit, but I’ll make them work, somehow.
So from my own understanding, the wines aren’t subjected to oak. But the 12 Colonnello was ridiculously coconutty.
I haven’t ever been able to pin down what it is but the recent wines just don’t taste “traditional” to me the way G or B Mascarello or G Rinaldi or G Conterno does. I make no statement labelling Aldo Conterno as a traditionalist or modernist, but will only say that I find the wines disappointing and not always correct. I’ve struggled with this, as I’ve genuinely tried to understand why I don’t like the wines. Maybe the best way to put it is that I just find the wines boring. Nothing wrong, but nothing interesting to say either.
I’m glad you said the above and in the blunt way that you did.
This is always in the back of my mind, and if it were true, AG would not have been the first person to do so.
I am a subscriber, and I enjoy the site very much. I view it as entertainment as well as derive some confirmation and insight from Josh Raynolds and Ian D’Agata.
I have come to the conclusion that Antonio likes wine much more than I do. When I started looking at the scores, I was skeptical. When I started reading the descriptions of specific wines they made sense in the context of the vintage.
I personally think that a wine that uses nervous, tightly wound, compact, not ready to charm soon is probably not something I am interested in regardless of score.
I went to a tasting of 2012 Baroli - a lesser vintage - in October 2016. I found many wines that I thought were very good and I bought a few based on that experience. That is really the rub - we weren’t tasting the wines when AG did. Also, that is one snapshot in a point in time. Who really knows how these wines will develop.
For me, it will be easy to mostly pass on this vintage. I’ll try to buy favorite producers in small quantity to track their development just like I always do. I also hope I get a chance to try a bunch of the 2014’s in a tasting format in the fall.
One last point, the overall quality level of these wines has greatly improved over the last decade +. We can argue, new paradigm or changes in style both plus and minus, but dirty, green, unpleasant wines are much harder to find now and seem largely a thing of the past.
True dat! And to make matters worse, some feel the need to assign nefarious motives for both the high and low scores. With that degree of distrust, why even bother to look?
Someone posted above that he thought the quality of the estate’s wines was going downhill. In that case he is perfectly right to point that out and score accordingly.
I don’t buy Barolo and I don’t subscribe to Vinous but if I did both I would want to know his honest opinion. Especially if it was poor.
Because it most likely affects pricing and availability.
Let’s have a summary of AG’s score for recent vintages: (the wines with controversial scores are in bold for easy reference)
2006 Score Review Date
Barolo 90+ Feb 2010
Colonnello 93 Feb 2010
Cicala 94 Feb 2010
Romirasco 92+ Feb 2010
Granbussia 96 Jan 2014
2007
Barolo 92+ Feb 2011
Colonnello 94 Feb 2011
Cicala 94 Feb 2011
2008
Barolo 93 Apr 2012
Colonnello 95 Apr 2012
Cicala 95 Apr 2012
Romirasco 96 Apr 2012
Granbussia 87 Nov 2016
2009
Barolo Bussia 92 May 2013
Colonnello 93+ May 2013
Cicala 94 May 2013
Romirasco 94+ May 2013
2010
Barolo Bussia 93+ Jan 2014
Colonnello 95 Jan 2014
Cicala 97 Jan 2014
Romirasco 96+ Jan 2014
2011
Barolo Bussia 89 Mar 2015
Colonnello 93 Mar 2015
Cicala 91 Mar 2015
Romirasco 94 Mar 2015
2012
Colonnello 87 Nov 2016
Cicala 88 Nov 2016
Romirasco 89 Nov 2016
2013
Barolo 85 Feb 2018
Colonnello 86 Feb 2018
Cicala 86 Feb 2018
The reason why I include the review date is that it seems to me whichever wines reviewed since Nov 2016 got exceptionally low scores, irrespective of vintage. One can see that for vintage 2008 only Granbussia (reviewed together with 2012 Baroli in Nov 2016) got a particularly low score, while the other 2008s that were reviewed in 2012 got very favourable scores. That leads me to suspect that the relationship between AG and Conterno brothers somehow turned sour between 2015 and 2016, and all Aldo Conterno wines got badly scored afterwards.
I thought it was somms we were supposed to hate???
Don’t worry, plenty to go around…
Kidding aside, skepticism surrounding a subjective product like wine is a good thing IMHO.
I’m not sure if AG’s critics are guilty of willfull omission, or emphasizing “alternate facts”. Since I’ve never been interested in A. Conterno’s wines, I haven’t followed their story. But in the case of his “sacrificing other sacred cows”, he gives reasons for why he thinks these estates have diminished in quality. In the case of Giacosa, he clearly attributes Dante Scaglione’s leaving for much of the estate’s problems, and his return as reason for optimism for improvement. With his dissatisfaction with G. Mascarello’s Monprivato, he attributes generational succession and the replanting of vines as being culpable. Perhaps the solution is to use the Adrian So method of scoring and give everything 93 points. That should make both the point inflators and the low ballers happy.
I’d be interested in anyone’s perspective who has tasted the 2008 A. Conterno, as that seems like the oddball, where the initial reviews of the Cicala, etc were very positive and then the review of the Granbussia from the same vintage is highly negative. It would seem unlikely, but not impossible, for there to be a significant stylistic difference from the '08 Granbussia vs. the other '08 wines.
In the case of the other producers “fallen from grace” in AG’s eyes, it seems clear he still values the estate and history and does not have a vendetta. AG gave low scores to the 2010 Monprivato, for instance, but around the same timeframe was praising older G. Mascarello wines. Same for B. Giacosa.
When I visited in 2005 with an ITB friend, several of the wines showed coconut or other oak flavors, and others reported similar experiences with some of their wines in the early 2000s. The cellar has oodle of barriques, which they say are used for the chardonnays and barbera, but it was hard to think the Barolos we tasted didn’t see some small, new oak.
Apart from that issue, some of us have had issues with some of their '96s cracking up. (I think John Stimson also posted on this). That’s very strange given that '96 is perhaps the vintage of the last 25 years that most people see requiring the most aging.
Jonathan - Thanks for posting those scores. Galloni was pretty negative about 2012 generally, wasn’t he? How do the Aldo Conterno scores for the '12s compare to other major producers in '12?
The '13 scores are the real surprise.
The 2012 Conterno Francia he gave 97 pts, which is the highest scoring 2012…but plenty he gave 93-95 points to, including Bartolo, G. Rinaldi, etc.
OK. I wasn’t sure.
The premise that Vinous (AG) has some vendetta and purposely scored these wines low and not based on the tasting itself, is ridiculous. Putting aside the ethical issue of someone doing this, it makes zero business sense. I don’t subscribe to Vinous or personally know AG or any of his staff, but everything I’ve read suggests he and his organization operate with complete integrity.
The note on the 2013 Cicala includes “searing tannins”
More interesting facts - Galloni in no way singles out AC for the ‘14s. There are quite a few other producers that are panned, with lower or similar scores (Borgogno, Brezza, Damilano, Grimaldi, others).
I think it’s pretty well understood in the wine biz that reviewers spend their time with what they perceive to be the ‘better’ producers. This is a self-reinforcing system in which it is a rare thing to see terrible reviews from the big reviewers. Heck, The NY Times book review behaves similarly (for books, not wine!). This doesn’t invalidate professional wine reviewing, at least IMHO, just means I have to use the information carefully, which I do.
The shocking thing here is the turn from 2011 to 2012 for AC. It’s surprising, but I see it as an outlier in what is always a subjective exercise.
Disclosure: I subscribe to Vinous (and Burghound) and have been to their events.
Very well said. Dilly Dilly!
Come on folks. I thought this board was in general pretty intelligent, but how is it that one can claim to be suspect about someones review of a specific wine when you haven’t actually tasted the same wine?
To be fair, there is a thread on the vinous board involving folks who had actually tasted the wines, I believe 2013, and disagreed with his assessment (a group in Scandanavia who I believe are friends of the estate), but he stuck with his impressions.
I actually have a fair amount of experience with the wines. the wines made by Aldo up till 1990 are wonderful. In the mid 90’s the kids got involved, and there was experimentation (micro-oxygenation has been mentioned) and higher yields. The wines from 96-98 in my experience were frequently oxidized and flawed. Don’t know the true reason. 1999-2004 wines are all very good. Don’t know after, but sounds like they remained good until recent vintages (eg after 2010?).
No one has actually referenced a specific review, so here’s an example–review of 2013 Colonello:
“Sweet oak, dark cherry and mocha are pushed forward in the 2013 Barolo Colonnello, a monolithic, wine with little in the way of Nebbiolo character or site expression. The 2013 has plenty of power and depth, but the tannins are just too coarse. Conterno’s Colonello is usually much more polished than this. It’s hard to find any real pleasure in this dark, oaky Barolo.”