Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
James Suckling
This is a longtime favorite, due to its purity of fruit and freshness, showing green-papaya, lime, lemon and green-apple character. Medium body. Crisp acidity. No wood. Steely and fruity at the end. Drink now.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Roero Arneis is a fragrant and linear white wine with plenty of spicy lemon, tangerine and crushed stone aromas. The 2017 vintage of this wine (from a hotter vintage) showed more tropical fruit, whereas this cooler vintage offers more citrus and mineral notes. Bruna Giacosa tells me that she prefers 2017 over this 2018; however, it's all a matter of personal choice. I am partial to this vintage because of those tangy flavors and the wine's precisely linear quality. However, this wine is set to flesh out and gain in volume after the summer because Arneis starts to show its best results in September following the harvest.
Rating: 91+
Yielding a dry and subtly scented wine, Arneis is the star white grape of Piedmont. Though the grape has been local to Roero since the 1400s, it didn’t experience real popularity until the 1980s when local demand for white wine exploded. Somm Secret—A few key Roero producers are also focusing on exploring the ageability of high quality Arneis. It is only grown outside of Piedmont to a very limited extent.
Even to this day, the Roero folklore lives on about witchcraft lurking behind its dramatic contours and obscure woods—but these stories only add to the region’s allure and charm. Actually today Roero winemakers are some of the most astute and motivated in Piedmont. While the white Arneis has attracted global attention for some time, now Roero Nebbiolo wines (elevated to the same DOCG status as Barolo and Barbaresco) are making a name for themselves. Keep an eye on any labeled with the vineyard, Valmaggiore, as Barolo producers have been investing here for years. If you’re looking for hidden gems, this is your region!