Winemaker Notes
: Garnet-red in color with ruby shades. An intense perfume with clean scents of spices, vanilla, roasted hazelnuts, licorices, cacao and wild rose. A full, elegant flavor, austere and good-bodied, with recurring olfactory sensations. The hints of spices and of wood blend perfectly.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Ample rose, cherry and raspberry flavors highlight this rich, powerful Barolo. This is shaded by leather and mineral notes, with dense tannins providing the framework. Balanced and long. Best from 2022 through 2039.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2013 Barolo Tradizione opens to medium color intensity and a ruby-garnet color. This is a classically-styled Barolo from a classic vintage that showed a long growing season for slow and steady ripening of fruit (that Nebbiolo loves). This is a tonic and firm wine with a good amount of inner tension and energy within. The bouquet is a bit muddled at this young stage but the wine should iron itself out with a another year or two of bottle aging.
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.