Winemaker Notes
It achieves its best expression when served with red meats, particularly game, and with dishes dressed with truffle. It is also excellent with fresh egg pasta and meat sauce, and with risotto, as well as medium-mature cow's milk and goat's milk cheeses.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Beguiling scents of fragrant berry, rose petal, baking spice, new leather and aromatic herbs swirl around in the glass. The vibrant palate is loaded with finesse, doling out morello cherry, crushed raspberry, cinnamon and star anise, while polished tannins and bright acidity provide impeccable balance. It's just gorgeous and while it's already accessible, it also shows midterm aging potential.
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James Suckling
Very beautiful aromas of orange peel, plums and berries follow through to a medium to full body, firm and silky tannins and a long finish. Better in 2019.
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Wine Spectator
Offers alluring aromas of sweet, ripe cherry and berry, rose and truffle. Firms up on the palate, yet expands the range of flavors, adding leather, iron and underbrush notes. Finishes on the burly side, but should repay aging. Fine length. Best from 2020 through 2033.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2013 Barolo is elegant and streamlined. This vintage is a bit tighter, more compact and better suited to medium or long-term cellar aging. You feel that positive nervous energy locked with the fruit on display here. Pressed cherry and spice are followed by balsam herb and fragrant rose hip. The wine shows cooling and smooth intensity. Some 62,000 bottles were produced.
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.