Winemaker Notes
Thanks to its viscosity and body, Barolo is the ideal wine to pair with elaborate dishes and dishes like truffle dishes, meat dishes, pasta with porcini mushrooms, game, and aged cheeses. Cerequio is also perfect with dry pastries or chocolate.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Plenty of dried-orange and berry character with hints of chocolate and coffee. Medium to full body with chewy tannins and a flavorful finish. Chewy at the end. Needs time to open and soften. Try after 2024.
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Wine Spectator
This is ripe and offers richness to its cherry, currant, juniper and wild thyme flavors. The tannins are well integrated, while this stays fresh, with notes of iron, earth and tobacco on the lingering aftertaste. Best from 2024 through 2042.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Representing about 4,900 bottles to be releases in the fall, the 2017 Barolo Cerequio is tempered and mild, growing in intensity as the wine takes on more oxygen in the glass. The fruit is supple and nicely shaped, both by the heat of the vintage and the careful use of oak for the refinement and aging. This is an open and accessible wine from one of the most celebrated sites in the Barolo appellation.
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Wine Enthusiast
This opens with aromas of forest floor, menthol and French oak. The palate is rather austere, offering cranberry, vanilla, coconut and coffee bean alongside tight, fine-grained tannins that leave a drying finish.
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.