Winemaker Notes
Achieves its best expression when served with red meats, particularly game, and with dishes dressed with truffle. Also excellent with fresh egg pasta and meat sauce, and with risotto, as well as medium-mature cow's milk and goat's milk cheeses.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Plum, earth, hay, leather, licorice, tar and iron flavors are the hallmarks of this powerful red. Offers a dense matrix of tannins, but the finish is long and finds equilibrium in the end.
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James Suckling
Impressive vibrant strawberries. A lighter fruited style with poached cherries and vanilla. Attractive fragrances, too. The palate has a mellow, medium-bodied feel, and the tannins are nicely shaped.
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Wine Enthusiast
This fragrant red offers delicate, enticing scents of wild berry, blue flower and a whiff of camphor. On the vibrant, focused palate, refined tannins and bright acidity frame juicy red cherry, raspberry and white pepper. It’s elegant—almost ethereal—and already approachable. Drink through now–2024.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2014 Barolo is an accessible, mid-weight wine with varietal aromas of wild berry, smoke, forest floor and grilled herb. This wine washes over the palate with silky intensity and fine tannins that already show a very good level of integration. I would wait a few more years to enjoy this bottle, but ultimately this wine can be consumed in the near or medium term. It already shows very nice balance at this young age. Bottle production is 50,000 units strong.
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Wine & Spirits
Taut tannins and vibrant acidity frame this wine’s red-cherry flavors, giving the wine a snappy texture that’s further enlivened by notes of orange zest. The flavors take on undertones of tobacco with exposure to air, balancing the high-toned fruit and mouthwatering acidity.
Responsible for some of the most elegant and age-worthy wines in the world, Nebbiolo, named for the ubiquitous autumnal fog (called nebbia in Italian), is the star variety of northern Italy’s Piedmont region. Grown throughout the area, as well as in the neighboring Valle d’Aosta and Valtellina, it reaches its highest potential in the Piedmontese villages of Barolo, Barbaresco and Roero. Outside of Italy, growers are still very much in the experimentation stage but some success has been achieved in parts of California. Somm Secret—If you’re new to Nebbiolo, start with a charming, wallet-friendly, early-drinking Langhe Nebbiolo or Nebbiolo d'Alba.
The center of the production of the world’s most exclusive and age-worthy red wines made from Nebbiolo, the Barolo wine region includes five core townships: La Morra, Monforte d’Alba, Serralunga d’Alba, Castiglione Falletto and the Barolo village itself, as well as a few outlying villages. The landscape of Barolo, characterized by prominent and castle-topped hills, is full of history and romance centered on the Nebbiolo grape. Its wines, with the signature “tar and roses” aromas, have a deceptively light garnet color but full presence on the palate and plenty of tannins and acidity. In a well-made Barolo wine, one can expect to find complexity and good evolution with notes of, for example, strawberry, cherry, plum, leather, truffle, anise, fresh and dried herbs, tobacco and violets.
There are two predominant soil types here, which distinguish Barolo from the lesser surrounding areas. Compact and fertile Tortonian sandy marls define the vineyards farthest west and at higher elevations. Typically the Barolo wines coming from this side, from La Morra and Barolo, can be approachable relatively early on in their evolution and represent the “feminine” side of Barolo, often closer in style to Barbaresco with elegant perfume and fresh fruit.
On the eastern side of the Barolo wine region, Helvetian soils of compressed sandstone and chalks are less fertile, producing wines with intense body, power and structured tannins. This more “masculine” style comes from Monforte d’Alba and Serralunga d’Alba. The township of Castiglione Falletto covers a spine with both soil types.
The best Barolo wines need 10-15 years before they are ready to drink, and can further age for several decades.