Winemaker Notes
Ruby and garnet red in color, this elegant and harmonious wine offers notes of mature fruits, mint, eucalyptus, and fine spices with fine tannins.
Drink with mushroom pasta, roasted meat and game, mature cheese.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Cerequio is an iconic cru and does not disappoint. Immediately aromas of warmed cherries, mint, eucalyptus and mixed spices breeze in and out of the wine while savory and earth notes try their best to be noticed. Tannins are so wellcrafted, they provide a strong foundation but feel light as a feather while fruit, herbs and earth flavors create a triumvirate that would make ancient Rome blush.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The Michele Chiarlo 2019 Barolo Cerequio is a bold and elegantly concentrated expression with good heft and staying power. That extra richness is the secret of this vintage, and this wine carries that weight with ease and grace. Flavors of dark fruit, plum and spice give the wine momentum over the palate. This bottle needs more years of cellar age.
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James Suckling
Aromas of dried strawberry, meat and rose stems follow through to a medium body, with firm and slightly chewy tannins and a medium finish. Linear and racy. It needs three or four years to soften.
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Wine Spectator
Dense and vibrant, this red exhibits a complex array of aromas and flavors, including cherry, raspberry, rose, menthol, tar and iron. Balanced and long, with a firm grip on the palate-staining finish. Be patient. Best from 2027 through 2047. 1,000 cases made, 200 cases imported.
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Vinous
The 2019 Barolo Cerequio is a powerful, brooding wine. Black cherry, leather, incense, tobacco, mocha, dried flowers and chocolate all meld together. As always, the Chiarlo Cerequio is dark, ample and imposing; more power than finesse, elements that build nicely into the substantial finish.
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.