Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This is really something, with superb concentration of fruit and tannins. It’s powerful yet harmonious with a muscular sense and agile feel. Blackberries and strawberries with bark and wet-earth undertones. Goes on for a long time on the palate. Give it three to five years of bottle age to come around. Best after 2024.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The La Spinetta 2017 Barolo Campè Vürsù sources its fruit from the Garretti vineyard in Grinzane Cavour. The wine shows depth, vertical intensity and quite an impressive range of aromas that span redcurrant and berry to hazelnut paste and earthy truffle. Despite the shiny ruby appearance of the wine, this is a full-bodied Barolo with plenty of power and true grit, or what the Italians call "grinta." Give those nervous tannins time and patience.
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Jeb Dunnuck
Campe is a selected parcel within the cru of Garretti in Grinzane Cavour. The 2017 Barolo Campe Versu is smoky with tobacco, cedar, menthol, and dried cherry. There is ample fruit, including blackberry, balsamic, and stony earth, and building, firm tannins on the finish that will need time in cellar to meld. Drink 2024-2042.
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.