Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Lifted with red fruits, the 2019 Barolo Arborina is perfumed with wild raspberry, roses, and sweet herbs. This svelte and medium-bodied red offers a silky mineral texture, with fine tannins and fresh acidity, revealing notes of fresh orange, peach, and sandy earth. I love where this is now, but it will be great drinking over the coming 10-15 years.
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James Suckling
Lovely perfume to this with orange blossom, cherry, and strawberry aromas. The palate is medium- to full-bodied with firm and racy tannins and a long and refined finish. This shows polish, integration and length that is excellent for the vintage. Try after 2027.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
With fruit from one of the most beautiful spots in La Morra that enjoys wide panoramic views of the surrounding vineyards, this is another classic Nebbiolo from a great vintage. The Mauro Veglio 2019 Barolo Arborina opens to wild cherry, licorice and blue flower. The house style prizes just a tad more richness and concentration, although the quality of fruit remains beautifully polished throughout. Arborina ages in barrique for 24 months with 25% new oak and 75% neutral wood.
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.