Winemaker Notes
Ruby red colored, this wine shows bricklike hues, it’s fresh to the nose, vibrant with nut and leathery scents. The palate is soft, featuring a sweet traditional tannin, elegant and persistent.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Very attractive aromas of roses and dried strawberries with some tar, following through to a medium body with firm, polished tannins and gorgeous orange peel to the strawberry flavors. Drink after 2021 and beyond.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The Gianfranco Bovio 2016 Barolo is a wine of vivid energy and brightness. The fruit shows a crisp and pure quality with wild berry, dried violet, candied orange peel and crushed limestone. It shows a smooth and silky texture that holds firm to the palate. Winemaking is simple, with brief skin macerations. When fermentation is complete, the wine is racked over to botte grande for two years of aging, followed by six months in cement. The fruit comes from both La Morra and Castiglione Falletto.
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Wine Enthusiast
Red berry, blue flower and a whiff of menthol form the delicate nose. The linear, medium-bodied palate is already accessible, offering strawberry, cranberry and star anise alongside taut, polished tannins and fresh acidity. Drink through 2026.
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.