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G. D. Vajra Barolo Albe 2007

Had Barolo with fried chicken yesterday. Actually a pretty good match.

Zesty Gattinara

Zesty and mouth-puckeringly tannic, Gattinara is the perfect antidote.

Vigneti Massa Costa del Vento 2005

Some time ago I wrote about lesser-known grape varieties from Italy’s Piedmont such as Grignolino, Quagliano and Nascetta. Today, a grape that’s perhaps more obscure than all: Timorasso. There’s 50 ha left of this grape, which until recently was on the verge of extinction, replaced as it was by the more productive and hassle-free Cortese di Gavi.

It’s a vintner named Walter Massa who struggled to keep Timorasso going, and there is now a minor renaissance underway, in the Colli Tortonesi DOC in Piedmont’s south-eastern corner, bordering with Liguria and Lombardy.

Gavi wines acquired international fame several centuries ago for their richness of flavour and standing power (two characteristics that escape modern Gavis, based on Cortese). The key to success was Timorasso, a powerful, late-ripening grape capable of astounding concentration and depth. We’re talking about a white wine that was often harnessed to red wine use at the table: fowl, rabbit, even game are staples in this area.

I bought this bottle of Walter Massa Derthona Timorasso Costa del Vento 2005 in 2007, but Timorasso is intended for ageing and at five years this is just beginning to show its breed. Initially a little subdued and unaromatic, honeyed, slightly evolved, it later develops plenty of tropical fruit flavours and a strong scent of dark honey. It carries its whopping 14.5% alc. rather well. The texture is rich suggesting oak ageing (Julia Harding also noticed this, though this wine sees no oak at all!), but this is really not just another oaky Chardonnay: the flavours are more complex and distinctive, the whole is truly engaging, and engagingly vivacious (the combination of tropical fruit and high acidity is a hallmark of Timorasso). Development over two days of drinking has been very good, and this wine will improve further.

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Patience required

Barolo and Barbaresco age well. I checked. Click for details.

Goodbye barrique

My first day at the Nebbiolo vintage presentation here in Alba was dedicated to Roero (the Nebbiolo grape’s northern outpost, with simpler, most rustic wines, and a few standouts such Monchiero Carbone’s brilliant 2006 Printi Riserva, and the lesser-known Ghiomo wines) and Barbaresco. For Barbaresco, it’s the 2007 vintage that’s on the tasting table. I’m really happy with 2007. Most wines are showing some terrific fruit and very good freshness. They’re also tannic, but less dense or structured than in big vintages such as 2004 or 2006. They might not be for the very long haul but the fruit in many is irresistible.

Giuseppino Anfossi of Ghiomo: great guy, lovely wines.

My top wines of the day came from some lesser-known estates (well, that’s the charm of blind tasting) such as Cascina Morassino and Punset (Campo Quadro and Basarin). Tasting 60 to 70 very similar wines blind often distorts your perspective more than non-blind tasting would, but Morassino was top of my list two years ago too, so it’s no coincidence. Marchesi di Grésy and their winemaker Marco Dotta also made some terrific wines: not only the Martinenga 2007 but also the Camp Gros 2004 and 2000 were extremely impressive.

It’s generally been my best Barbaresco tasting ever here in Alba. Not just because the wines were so good (many were) but also because the winemaking approach is very clearly changing for the better. In the past, many Barbarescos were marred by overambitious vinification, overextraction, dry tannins and an enthusiastic embrace of new oak (which is a notorious disaster with most Nebbiolo-based wines). Five years ago the majority of the new bottlings were dark and inky as Chilean Cabernet. This year, the colours are luminous crimsons and rubies with the typical Nebbiolo wide rims often falling into orange. I’ve taken the below photo from a random sample this morning, and it really shows how the return to tradition is gathering momentum. Gone are the years of creamy vanilla new oak Nebbiolo. These wines are becoming the ridiculous anomaly rather than the norm, as the grape’s natural freshness and bright fruitiness is allowed to speak freely. That’s good!

Disclaimer
My stay in Italy including flights, accomodation and wine tasting programme is paid for by Albeisa, the Piedmontese producers’ association. All the wines mentioned in this post were provided by the producers.

Simple pleasures

I’m in Alba in Piedmont for an event called Nebbiolo Prima (formerly Alba Wines Exhibition), a preview of the new vintages of Piedmont’s most important wines: Barolo, Barbaresco, and Roero. It’s a great opportunity to taste more or less all the important wines from my favourite wine region. And it’s consistently one of Europe’s best organised and most exciting tasting.

Apart from its wines Piedmont also has spectacular scenery and some world-class food which I’ll be enjoying over the next few days, from cheese through meat to chocolate and grappa. Before you think it’s a nice vacation imagine tasting around 120 of the world’s most tannic wines every day. It’s really taxing. So today I’m taking it slowly and enjoying this warm sunny Sunday on Alba’s main drag, watching that Italian wonder of social choreography called the passeggiata, and having an al fresco lunch of the local raw beef and tajarin pasta. With this, I’m drinking Vietti’s Roero Arneis 2009, a deliciously unpretentious sugary-lemony light white from the local Arneis grape, as well as the Langhe Freisa Le Naturé 2008 from Pelissero. The latter is crazy stuff like they only make them in Italy: a lightly sparkling dry red with pungent cherry fruit and masses of brett, too. It’s a challenging wine that I’d never let into my dining room with other humans but here, with the pasta under the sun, it somehow works.

Disclaimer
My stay in Italy including flights, accomodation and wine tasting programme is paid for by Albeisa, the Piedmontese producers’ association. I paid for the above lunch and both wines.

Four delicious Barolos

I’m off to Barolo on Sunday for an exciting tasting of the newly released 2006s. As I mentally prepare for the high acids and assertive tannins of this classic Italian wine, I opened a few bottles from the wine rack. Proudly traditional Barolos exactly as I like them.

The estate of Aurelio Settimo, now run by Aurelio’s daughter Tiziana, has vineyards in the village of La Morra, and more precisely in the lower-lying neighbourhood of Annunziata. This is the warmest part of the Barolo district and usually delivers wines of high ripeness and power. But the grand cru of Rocche, due to its special soil, yields a more structured tannic Barolo that usually needs of considerable bottle age to soften. I tasted the 2004 and 2005 Rocche. The former is considered a better vintage. Made in an orthodox traditional style with very long ageing in large oak barrels (botti), the nose here is a little reticent (raspberry, cranberry, minor cherry) but the palate, with its powerful architecture and unadulterated Nebbiolo tannins, is very satisfying; 2004 is a tight vintage for the long haul and it really shows here. While the tannins are fierce here, all the elements necessary for a positive evolution are present: balanced acidity, elegant fruit, minerality and very good length, although it seems a bit low on fruit at the moment.

The Barolo Rocche 2005 is just a little fuller in colour but also with a hint of orange, a real Nebbiolo. The nose is a cooler climate thing than the 2004: plumpier, fruitier, more cherry than cranberry, less rigid and austere at this stage. It’s really quite attractive, and the palate is also more approachable with more presence of fruit at mid-palate, and less aggressive tannins. I have a soft spot for the mouth-puckering no-prisoners-taken style of the 2004 but for overall balance and harmony the 2005 is more attractive today, no doubt. It’s really quite a difference between the two, in fact.

The Settimo style is a bit of an endangered species in Barolo these days, as more and more estates move to a fruitier, less austere expression of Barolo. To me, there’s something beguilingly noble and alluring in the bittersweet, tannic juiciness of these wines. Long may they continue.

The other trio of samples came from Luigi Baudana, a rather obscure traditional estate that as of 2008 has been taken over by Aldo and Milena Vaira of the superstar G. D. Vajra estate; it’s their eldest son Giuseppe that will be overseeing the production here (the labels and ranges will be kept separate). I tasted the rather neutral and forgettable Langhe Chardonnay 2008 that was rather neutral, and two very good Barolos. The simple blended Barolo 2005 is what I would like to drink more often: a simple (but authentic), medium-bodied, everyday drinking Barolo. Low-key on the nose with moderately intense fruit, herby and spicy, it shows a palate that’s very classic in style, clean with good length, balanced tannins, ripe acidity, if again a little unfruity and unintense. Where it lacks in intensity and boldness it scores very high is purity and authenticity: for a duck breast risotto last Sunday I really needed nothing flashier.

The Barolo Baudana 2005 (grapes from the Baudana and Cerretta, on the structured white soils of Serralunga d’Alba) is a more serious affair. Less vegetal, more floral than the 05 Barolo above, it shows an outstanding evolution in the glass. Concentrated and textured, this shows ripe tannins and unaggressive acids, but also more minerality and tannic structure with time in glass. The 2005 Barolos are typically soft approachable wines that will not age endlessly but this one, with its tight minerality, should two or three years. It really bodes extremely well for the Baudana estate under its new management.

Giacomo Conterno Barbera d’Alba 2000

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.

Happy New Year

Dear Readers, best wishes for the New Year!

I’m not very fond of self-referential blogging but want to say on this festive occasion how rewarding it has been to run this blog and receive comments and encouragement. As I’ve topped 10,000 visits to this modest diary in exactly one year of sharing my wine and tea drinking with you, it’s proved a great experience overall.

No big New Year’s Eve celebrations chez Bońkowski this year: we’ve been babysitting and so Champagne has been limited to a few glasses of the Pierre Moncuit Grand Cru Blanc de Blancs Cuvée Pierre Moncuit-Delos – a crisp, driven, even slightly greenish Chardonnay that proved just a bit too young (though with over two years of disgorging), and a babysitter’s best friend – Moscato d’Asti. Paolo Saracco’s 2009 is a gorgeous glassful of fresh grapes, citrus and spring flowers, with balanced sweetness and great acidity, too. With 5% alcohol it was harmless to down the bottle between two, and that’s a great asset on New Year’s Eve if you ask me.

It’s my personal habit to open the best sweet wine I have (or one of the best) on New Year. Dessert wines lend themselves well to the relaxed late-morning pace I adopt on this day. This year, it was the Alois Kracher TBA No. 3 Scheurebe 1996. The late Alois Kracher was one of the greatest champions of botrytis wine in the world. Whatever the vintage, grape variety, and sweetness level he always managed to make a wine taste balanced and complete. This bottle is no different. It pours a deep amber and opens with an exhilarating liquid peach gelée nose, followed by lovely notes of toast, poppy seed and minerality. It’s really positively Tokaj-like both in the bouquet and the very good acidity that enlivens this 150+-grams-sugar wine. The palate is expansive and mildly mature, with that unmistakeable autumnal, fallen-leafy, honeyed character of great botrytis wine, and a finish that is growingly dry. It’s an auspicious wine for 2010. Happy New Year!

Disclaimer:

Source of wines: Moncuit Champagne – sample from the producer, Saracco Moscato, Kracher TBA – own purchases.

Giovanni Rosso Barolo Cerretta 2003

My tastes for wine are pretty eclectic, and I’d pretty much drink anything with interest unless it’s really overoaked and/or jammy. But when I think of one wine that I prefer over all others, it has to be Barolo. I have a weakness for those floral bouquets and high acidities, for that otherworldly elegance and unmistakeable sense of place of a good traditional Barolo. So when picking up a wine to drink in peace and solitude on Boxing Day I went for the Giovanni Rosso Barolo Cerretta 2003. A bottle I got as a gift, it comes from a lesser-known estate located in Serralunga, the eastern side of the Barolo zone, producing the appellation’s tightest and most ageworthy wines. Cerretta is one of the best vineyards there.

Owner Davide Rosso is very traditional in his winemaking, which sees long macerations and ageing in large botte oak barrels only (though they are of French wood, not Slavonian as in the old days, coopered by the Italian company Garbellotto). Already pouring the wine into the glass, with its pale transparent crimson colour, it’s obvious this Barolo has nothing to do with the reformist movement that tried to ‘correct’ Nebbiolo’s inherent characteristics, looking for darker, less acidic, softer-tannic wines. And yet this Cerretta 2003 is no stubborn orthodox with punishing tannins. On the contrary, it’s the epitome of elegance. I felt an exhilarating wave of pure sensual pleasure when smelling this: lilies, roses and tulips, raspberries and strawberries, with a counterpoint of almost minty freshness that is so typical of Serralunga Barolos. Really lovely finesse and purity. On the palate it’s a very balanced wine, juicy, fresh, floral, only disclosing its 2003-driven richness and breadth towards the end where the tannins are very assertive but nicely ripe and never drying. And remember this comes from the the hottest and driest vintage on record which brought a wave of tough fruitless reds in many place in Europe. This wine is showing no vintage weakness whatsoever. And it drank beautifully over three days with fantastic composure.

I’ve had many good bottles this year but this, somehow, was special. So extremely typical of why Barolo is special as a wine; proudly traditional yet immensely approachable and enjoyable to drink. And most importantly, with a crystal-clear sense of place that again brought a bit smile of happiness to my face.
Disclaimer
Source of wine: gift from the Polish importer