Winemaker Notes
Elegant with mouth-watering acidity and compelling aromas. Nada has 8.6 acres here, 90% of which is planted to Nebbiolo; exposure is southwest, making it warmer than Marcarini. For its first year, wine aged in a combination of tonneaux and botticelle, then transferred into big Slavonian casks for another year. Bottled without fining and with only a very light filtration. Pronounced "ca-zot" with a hard "t", like hot.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Barbaresco Casot is a fragrant and immediate wine that shows a good amount of ripeness and richness up front. This was a cool vintage overall, although the fruit ripened quickly toward the end of the growing season. There are sweet cherry aromas with spice and licorice. The wine drapes over the palate with silky and smooth intensity. The Casot vineyard is distinguished by layers of bluish tufo soil and layers of looser sand.
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Wine Enthusiast
Enticing scents of purple flower, wild berry and dark spice lift out of the glass. Racy and focused, the palate offers tart pomegranate, blood orange and black tea set against a backbone of firm, fine-grained tannins. It's still young and rather austere so give it a few more years to fully integrate.
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Wine & Spirits
Classic scents of tar and roses accent this wine’s bright red-cherry flavors. Those fruit tones gain flesh with air, picking up hints of fennel bulb and damp leaves that add a pleas- ant earthiness to the wine.Best Buy
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.
A wine that most perfectly conveys the spirit and essence of its place, Barbaresco is true reflection of terroir. Its star grape, like that in the neighboring Barolo region, is Nebbiolo. Four townships within the Barbaresco zone can produce Barbaresco: the actual village of Barbaresco, as well as Neive, Treiso and San Rocco Seno d'Elvio.
Broadly speaking there are more similarities in the soils of Barbaresco and Barolo than there are differences. Barbaresco’s soils are approximately of the same two major soil types as Barolo: blue-grey marl of the Tortonion epoch, producing more fragile and aromatic characteristics, and Helvetian white yellow marl, which produces wines with more structure and tannins.
Nebbiolo ripens earlier in Barbaresco than in Barolo, primarily due to the vineyards’ proximity to the Tanaro River and lower elevations. While the wines here are still powerful, Barbaresco expresses a more feminine side of Nebbiolo, often with softer tannins, delicate fruit and an elegant perfume. Typical in a well-made Barbaresco are expressions of rose petal, cherry, strawberry, violets, smoke and spice. These wines need a few years before they reach their peak, the best of which need over a decade or longer. Bottle aging adds more savory characteristics, such as earth, iron and dried fruit.