Barolo 2001: a great vintage

Posted on 10 May 2011

The Nebbiolo Prima event I’m attending presents newly released of Barolo and Barbaresco, Italyss most renowned wines. Barolo can be released starting with the fourth year after vintage: this year, 2007. But Barolo and Barbaresco are made for very long ageing and so even those three full years of maturation are just no enough.

To show the wines at a reasonable stage of evolution, Nebbiolo Prima has traditionnally featured a 10-year retrospective. I wrote last year about the 2000s; today I’ve sampled through 2001 Barolos. There’s no question it’s a great vintage. The general qualitative level as well as the fact that most 2001s are still several years too young make this vintage a real classic.

Piedmont has in fact been blessed with an unprecedented series of good vintages: between 1995 and 2010, only 2002 and 2003 are not up to par. Yet 2001 has an edge. It’s very structured – many wines still have quite some tannins to digest – but it also has rich, expressive fruit, and very good freshness.

2001 also marked a slow return to tradition after the climax of the new-oak modernist orientation between 1995 and 2000. Consequently, oak was not a major problem in the wines I tasted. But 2001s still represent stylistic diversity: ranging from the blueberry, extracted style of Prunotto’s Bussia (obviously a good wine, though not my style) to the almost rosé-like constitution of Castello di Verduno’s Massara. In fact it’s interesting how after a decade’s ageing, the historical terroir hierarchy is coming out very clearly: my favourite wines were almost exclusively from grands crus such as Bussia, Brunate, Vigna Rionda, Cerretta, Rocche dell’Annuziata.

2001s are also a good buy: priced similarly to older Barolo vintages like 1998, 1999 or 2000, it’s quite clearly a better year with considerable ageing potential. The best have another decade to go. Here’s a selection of wines I liked best:

[slideshow]

Disclosure

My trip to Piedmont including flights, accommodation and wine tasting programme is sponsored by the Albeisa association of wine producers.