Sandrone Dolcetto d'Alba 2017
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Winemaker Notes
The wine will be a fantastic match for simpler but richly flavored foods such as tagliatelle with a meat ragu, roast pork shoulder, polenta with spezzatino, or cured meats of all types.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Dolcetto d'Alba is even more Dolcetto-like in this hot vintage. This Piedmont variety loves a hot, dry summer, and that's exactly what it got during this scorching growing season. The bouquet bursts open to raw plum and succulent flavors that include dried blackberry and candied cherry. This wine is particularly opulent, rich and exuberant. It's almost too much of a good thing, in a positive way. Luciano Sandrone tells me this was the first vintage in his long winemaking career in which he harvested his Dolcetto before the end of August.
Rating: 91+ -
James Suckling
Nice blueberry and black-olive character on the nose and palate. Medium body. fruity finish.
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Wine Spectator
An intense nose of black cherry, blackberry and pomegranate notes marks this dense, concentrated red, which is well-structured but covered in fleshy fruit until the long finish. Drink now through 2024.
Other Vintages
2021-
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Robert
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Luciano Sandrone is one of the most iconic producers in Barolo, and his is both a well known and extraordinary story. He started to learn viticulture at the age of 14 or 15, and after years of work as a cellarman he depleted his life savings and purchased his first vineyard on the Cannubi hill in 1977, though he could only manage his land on the weekends while he continued to work. He made his first vintage in 1978, in the garage of his parents, and then spent years refining his ideas about how to make a wine of distinction and utmost quality that respected the traditions of Barolo while incorporating new ideas and understanding about viticulture and vinification. He made every vintage until 1999 at home, until the winery he constructed in 1998 was ready for use.
Sandrone's wines are sometimes described as straddling the modern and traditional styles in the region: elegant, attractive and easy to appreciate right from their first years in bottle, but with no less power and structure than traditional Barolos. Along with the extremely low yields in the vineyard and an obsessive attention to training, pruning and harvesting, Sandrone has a very rational approach in the cellar. This approach, however, is also unique and outside of simple classification: Sandrone subjects his wines to medium-length maceration period, shorter than traditional, but makes limited use of new oak in the maturation process, which takes place in 500 liter tonneaux, all signs of a more traditional approach in the cellar. The entire range of wines, all limited in production, are jewels of impeccably balanced concentration and precision, and the ability to age for long periods of time.