Winemaker Notes
Ruby red, deep garnet. Rich, with notes of red fruit, rose petals and earth, hints of spice and mint rise. Noble tannins, wonderfully fine-grained, silky and sweet.
Pair with roasted red meat, game, truffled foods and aged cheeses.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The Parusso family believes in the aging potential of Nebbiolo worked in a manner that brings out more structure and tannic power. It is important to taste back vintages to better gauge the evolution of these wines. The 2017 Barolo Bussia opens a window onto the family vision. This was a hot vintage, and that helps bring in a note of sweet fruit, but this wine is plush and rich with savory tobacco, spice and fragrant tea. You taste the ripeness of the vintage with a hint of cherry marmalade, but otherwise the aromas veer toward autumn leaf, rusty nail and iron. The wine is structured, rigid and quite powerful.
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Vinous
The 2017 Barolo Bussia is the only single-vineyard Barolo Marco Parusso bottled in 2017. A gorgeous, towering wine, the 2017 is positively stellar. Intense red fruit, blood orange, white truffle, spice, menthol and rose petal are all dialed up to the maximum. Translucent yet potent, this is one of the finest wines I have tasted from Marco Parusso. At seven years of age, it is still an infant, but it remains an exotic Barrolo with enough inner perfume and sweetness to play off its tannins.
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James Suckling
An evolved wine with chocolate, blood oranges, cherries and macerated flowers on the nose. Seemingly sweet on the palate, with firm, dusty tannins, lifted acidity and a slightly dry 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.