Winemaker Notes
2017 is to be considered a very good vintage. Despite being characterized by hot and dry summer months, water reserves in the soil and September rain saved the vines from being stressed by water shortage. These factors, together with the excellent exposure of our plots and the scrupulous practices adopted in the vineyard during the growing season, allowed the grapes to fully ripen, avoiding to anticipate the harvest date too much. The 2017 wines are incredibly pleasant to drink: they are rich in crunchy red fruit, with an energetic mouthfeel, dominated by freshness and elegant tannins.
Professional Ratings
-
Wine Enthusiast
Made by the estate that put this celebrated cru on the map, and showing an enviable combination of elegance and power, this stunning wine opens with aromas of wild berries, underbrush, dark spice and balsamic notes of cedar and new leather. The tense, savory palate is loaded with youthful energy, showing succulent Marasca cherry, raspberry, cinnamon and star anise framed in tightly knit, refined tannins and surprisingly bright acidity for the vintage. A mineral note suggesting iron adds depth to the close.
-
Wine & Spirits
In the hot and dry growing season of 2017, Ravera’s cool position and exposure to winds from the Alps were a real advantage. The wine is brimming with fresh floral scents, its crunchy red- and black-cherry flavors laced with cool menthol and licorice notes. This vintage also marks the first time that Valter Fissore fermented his Ravera fruit on the stems, about 50 percent in this case, a practice that has added an extra level of brightness and aromatic complexity to the wine.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The Ravera cru is seeing renewed energy and interest, thanks to the hard work of the Elvio Cogno team. They believed in Novello from the very beginning, and today a wine like the 2017 Barolo Ravera shows special confidence and pride. This pretty Barolo made with a blend of Nebbiolo clones (Lampia and Michet) reveals a slow succession of aromas with dark cherry and blackberry. The results are lasting, contoured and beautifully focused, thanks to mineral notes of rusty iron or brick. Nuanced notes of licorice and campfire ash round off the finish.
-
James Suckling
Cherry and candied strawberry with flowers and some dried earth. Full-bodied, layered and chewy. Lots of wet earth and mushroom to the red fruit. Tight now. Try after 2023.
-
Wine Spectator
A tightly wound, linear red, this reveals steeped cherry and plum flavors, with shadings of tar, eucalyptus and licorice. The dense matrix of tannins rules the finish, yet this shows nice equilibrium overall.
The Cogno family has been making wine for four generations in Piedmont. In 1990, Elvio Cogno left a long and fruitful partnership with the venerable Barolo producer Marcarini at La Morra and bought a splendid, historic 18th-century farmhouse on the top of Bricco Ravera, a hill near Novello in the Langhe area. (Novello is one of the 11 communes in which Barolo is produced.) The farm was surrounded by 11 hectares (27.18 acres) of steeply sloped vineyards. Elvio restored the manor, converted the old granaries to wine cellars and founded his eponymous winery. For the next 20 years he devoted himself to the winemaking traditions handed down to him by his father and grandfather.
Elvio, in turn, has now passed the torch to his daughter, Nadia, and her husband, Valter Fissore, who has worked beside Elvio for 25 years. Following in the footsteps of Elvio the maestro, Elvio Cogno winery continues to produce elegant wines without altering the traditions, styles and flavors of the Langhe, with its breathtaking quilted landscape and unique grape varieties.
The Elvio Cogno winery sits at the top of Bricco Ravera, a hill near Novello in the Langhe area of Piedmont, one of the 11 communes in which Barolo is produced. Ravera is the finest cru of Novello, encircling the top of the hill and the winery, reaching a 380-meter (1,246-foot) elevation, with breathtaking views in all directions.
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.