Pio Cesare Barolo 2015
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Product Details
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Somm Note
Winemaker Notes
A classic style Barolo. Excellent structure, harmony, elegance. Soft tannins and balanced fruit. Approachable, but with a very long ageing potential. Barolo is such a great wine which should not be described as a “basic” or “regular” Barolo, simply because it does not have any additional indication on the label.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Complex aromas of smoke, ash and dark fruits with a precision and intensity. Layered and gorgeous. Loads of dark fruit and perfume. Full-bodied with round and wonderfully polished tannins. Wonderful length and richness. Goes on for minutes.
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Decanter
Dried flower petal nose with savory meaty hints, and captivating tension and freshness on the palate, of ripe and intense red berry-cherry fruit and harmonizing tannins.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Barolo is a beautifully balanced and tight expression of Nebbiolo that hits all the right spots on the palate, from the side of the mouth where you taste the acidity to the back where you get a sense of the wine's structure and integrated tannins. That freshness could pair well with a steak in pepper cream sauce. Long skin maceration times are followed by oak aging, partially in botti with a smaller part in barrique.
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Wine Enthusiast
Camphor, cedar, mature berry and pipe tobacco aromas are front and center. The full-bodied, linear palate shows strawberry compote, wild cherry, licorice and white pepper framed in taut, fine-grained tannins. Drink 2020–2027.
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Wine & Spirits
According to Pio Boffa, his team has worked for more than a decade to identify clones with smaller berries and clusters that give more consistent phenolic ripeness and allow them to pick earlier, which keeps alcohol levels moderate. They have also refined their oak regimen over the years, backing off their use of new French oak barriques in their Barolos so that just 20 percent of the wine rests in new barriques, the rest in large oak casks, for about 30 months. Their efforts show in Pio Cesare’s 2015 releases, some of the best we have tasted from this house. The 2015 Barolo is comprised of fruit from estate vineyards in five communes, including, for the first time, a small percentage from Monforte d’Alba’s Mosconi, acquired by the estate in 2014. It’s lively and long, with flavors of ripe red cherry and raspberry laced with subtle spice and bright notes of orange peel, the acidity drawing out the flavors into a balanced finish.
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Jeb Dunnuck
A classic 2015 with its core of sweet fruit and already hard to resist personality, the 2015 Barolo is more medium-bodied and elegant on the palate, with silky tannins and a rocking bouquet of candied violets, raspberries, rose petals, and licorice. It’s not a blockbuster, but it shines for its balanced, layered, charming style and just has wonderful fruit.
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Wine Spectator
A lean, tightly wound style, displaying light cherry, licorice, tobacco and mineral flavors. A streak of iron builds as this plays out on the austere finish. Best from 2022 through 2036.
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Pio Cesare has been producing wine for more than 100 years and through generations. The tradition began in 1881, when Pio Cesare started gathering grapes in his vineyards and purchasing those of some selected and reliable farmers in the hills of Barolo and Barbaresco districts.
At Pio Cesare, there has always been a conviction that great wine can come only from the finest grapes and the winery's output has always been limited through adherence to the highest standards. Pio Cesare limits its production by using only the most mature and healthy grapes. The ripening of the grapes is carefully monitored and the harvest is rigidly controlled with each grape selected by hand.
Today, the estate is managed by Pio Boffa, great-grandson of Pio Cesare. Under his stewardship, the wines of Pio Cesare have become famous throughout the world. Great strides have been made in quality, and single vineyard offerings have dazzled the wine press.
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.