Much to my chagrin I cannot afford the Barolos of Giacomo Conterno. This 45K-bottle estate in Piedmont’s Monforte d’Alba could well be the most famous and hyped of all Italy. And the entry ticket to the theatre of its epic, majestic, supremely ageworthy Barolo Cascina Francia is a hefty 95€ (the Monfortino Riserva, the last of the Barolo Mohicans, is three or four times that).
That’s a real shame, because I tremendously admire and enjoy these wines. I admire their absolute composure and uncompromised reverence of tradition. I delight in their raspberry & rose petal finesse (although that finesse is a polite grammatical way of making their stern structural statement). I admire Roberto Conterno’s soft-spoken way of refusing to depart even an inch from his father Giovanni’s and his grandfather Giacomo’s qualitative and stylistic standards. Non si cambia una virgola was his answer to what he’d change when I visited him in September 2005, a couple of years after Giovanni passed away.
Elephantine casks hosting Barolo in the Giacomo Conterno cellar.
Thankfully Conterno also makes one more affordable wine: a Barbera d’Alba that comes from the Cascina Francia plot in the commune of Serralunga and sees shorter oak than the Barolo here (although 14 months are quite a long élevage by Barbera standards), but otherwise comes close to a Barolo in structure and longevity. This 2000 version cost me 22€. (The current release, 2007, is 25€ at the winery).
It is a fairly aged example of Barbera, with little obvious fruitiness and a tertiary bouquet of game meat, dried herbs, with some balsamic oak overtones. The flavour is ample and long, bone-dry, with high acidity and still quite some unresolved tannins, although the fruit is a bit too low to speak about much further potential to age. Technically it’s not a perfect wine, with some rustic touches to the bouquet and a hint of volatile acidity.
Winemaking taken seriously: Roberto Conterno with geological analyses of Cascina Francia. (Photo taken September 2005).
Yet there’s something quite remarkable in how this wine completely ignores the modern ‘consumer taste’ and the flavour profile of contemporary wine. It’s not merely a traditional-style wine, like there are many in Piedmont. This Barbera is really more papal than the pope. It makes no concession whatsoever to the drinker: it’s stern, bone-dry, tart, bitter, tannic; there is sense of harmony and peace but it is the ascetic harmony of Gregorian chant. It’s the taste of wine from a now remote era, when great wine was something to aspire to, and not banally ‘consume’. A time when vintners weren’t told by journalists (or bloggers) what their wines should taste like. A wine to admire – and to enjoy, but humbly, not Vaynerchuk-style self-magnifyingly.
