Winemaker Notes
#55 Wine Spectator Top 100 of 2025
Garnet ruby red in color with orange reflections. The bouquet is ample and embracing, with pronounced fruity notes of cherry and plum and notes of tobacco, licorice and cocoa. On the palate, the wine is harmonious, pleasantly dry with soft tannins, broad and full-bodied. Persistent finish.
Cannubi is a sumptuous wine, perfect with the full-flavored Piedmontese cuisine such as white truffle -based dishes and braised meat. Ideal with the refined dishes of the great international gastronomy.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
A very restrained, remarkably elegant wine showing licorice, red currant, mint and balsamic notes on the nose. Medium- to full-bodied on the palate, it shows ripe, elegant tannins, chewy acidity and youthful style in the long, precise finish. Drinkable now, but best from 2027 for more complexity.
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Wine Spectator
Well-defined raspberry, cherry, menthol, iron, tar and woodsy aromas and flavors mark this intense, linear red. Juicy fruit and dense tannins square off, both heightened by the vibrant acidity. Shows fine balance, but just needs time. Best from 2029 through 2047.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The Damilano 2021 Barolo Cannubi represents a big production for this diminutive MGA site, with 35,000 bottles created. Aged in large oak casks, I found this wine to be closed on first nose (maybe reduced), with difficultly showing its aromas. There are budding notes of blackcurrant and iris, but it's hard to read this wine in its current state. It will require more time in bottle, and I hope to try it later to see if it opens.
Rating: 93? -
Wine Enthusiast
From Barolo's most storied hill comes a wine that plays all the greatest hits: red cherries, fresh roses, and that distinctive tar-and-roses perfume that makes Nebbiolo fanatics weak in the knees. It struts the classic Cannubi confidence with ripe fruit, subtle spices, and those perfectly placed tannins that feel like they're tailored by an Italian suit maker. This is Barolo showing off its best dress, ready for a night out but still knowing how to keep it real. Pure Nebbiolo pleasure from a vineyard that's been turning heads for centuries. Drink Now - 2045.
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.