Winemaker Notes
The Conca Barolo is a garnet red color. It has a delicate and persistent bouquet with traces of licorice, mint and cedar pine. On the palate, mineral, full and warm while agreeably tannic.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
One of the best Barolos of the vintage, this stunner opens with rose, forest berry, underbrush and new leather aromas. Drop dead gorgeous and just delicious, the full-bodied palate is loaded with flavor and finesse, featuring crushed raspberry, ripe red cherry, cake spice and licorice alongside taut, silky tannins. Fresh acidity keeps it balanced. While it's already fantastic, it also shows great aging potential. Drink 2024–2038.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Barolo Conca is tight and beautifully intense with cassis, sour cherry, wild rose and blue lilac. The wine's inner fiber is fine and delicate, with slight aromas of spice, licorice and toast at the edges. Barolo Conca awards a lot of fine elegance and a long, polished finish.
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James Suckling
Aromas of dried cherries with some spice and a hint of scorched orange rind. Medium-to full-bodied with a silky texture and an almost creamy mouth-feel. Intense, flavorful finish. The very fine tannins build a little towards the end. This has a lighter overall structure this year, but the intensity and focus and is not lacking.
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Wine Spectator
Broad and juicy, this reveals light plum, cherry and rose hip flavors, with accents of earth and eucalyptus. Firms up on the finish, so give this a year or two. Best from 2024 through 2038.
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.