The majority of Europe’s blue-chip wine appellations enjoyed a very successful 2010, including all of the “Big B’s”: Burgundy, Bordeaux, Brunello, and yes, Barolo. One of the hallmarks of 2010 for us, across all these diverse zones, has been the “completeness” of the wines – a seamless piecing together of fruit, acid, tannin and aromatics that marks a vintage free of climatic extremes.
The polished Barolo we are offering today perfectly exemplifies the charm of 2010: it is balanced in a way that makes it enticing to drink now, even though it’ll clearly be magical a decade or so down the line. Our advice is to grab at least one bottle for immediate consumption and some more to lay down.
Cantina Stroppiana is a small, family-run estate in the hamlet of Rivalta, in the northern part of La Morra, one of the key villages in the Barolo zone. Most of their 10 acres of vineyards are here, including San Giacomo, the source for this wine. Situated at about 400 meters elevation, the San Giacomo vineyard enjoys a full southern exposure, enabling it to take sun all day long, and this proved especially helpful in the cool 2010 growing season. Barolo’s Nebbiolo is a late-ripening variety to begin with, and 2010 was characterized as a “late” vintage, but there’s no shortage of ripe cherry fruit in Stroppiana’s San Giacomo; in fact, there’s a generosity to the fruit that makes me think that this is a vineyard site that shows best in cooler years.
This isn’t to say that the classic Barolo savor and structure isn’t there in spades (it is), but the sometimes-aggressive tannins of Nebbiolo are well-integrated and very fine-grained here, lending the wine its immediate approachability. This is something we see in many Barolos from La Morra, a commune with a reputation for a more softly contoured, perfumed style of Nebbiolo. These are some of the most ‘Burgundian’ of Baroli, whereas wines from communes such as Serralunga and Monforte tend to skew more austere and stony/savory.
If you’re a Barolo drinker you’ve likely heard people classify Barolo wines in either the ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’ camp, which would suggest that producers have to choose one path or the other. At first glance, this wine would likely fall in the ‘modern’ camp based on the fact that it is aged 15-18 months in French oak barriques before being transferred to much larger barrels for another year of aging. Rather than labeling it modern or traditional, though, we’d label it clean, delicious and varietally on-point.
All of the complexity that makes Nebbiolo special is on full display, from dried cherry and rose petals to tar and truffles and notes of black tea and warm spice. And while this wine isn’t as impenetrably tannic in its youth as some Old School styles, the rigid Barolo structure is evident. If you choose to drink it now – which we won’t discourage – decant it a good half-hour before you plan to drink it. Serve it in your biggest, balloon-iest Burgundy stems to fully appreciate its heady perfume, and try it with
pasta dressed with a classic Piedmontese sugo d’arrosto – literally a pasta sauce made with pan drippings from a braise. Cheers!
