In addition to the great value everyday bottles and perfectly aged classics we offer on this site, a few times each month we strive to present the absolute rarest and best bottles on the planet. These are wines that have over-achieved across multiple generations and today, enjoy an especially exalted status alongside the top bottles in the world.
Few wine professionals will dispute that Roagna is one of the most deservedly legendary estates to have mastered Barolo and Barbaresco’s complex terroirs. With the release of each new vintage, the global wine press reliably lavishes praise on the family while the bottles themselves disappear immediately into the cold cellars of the world’s top restaurants. Scarcity aside, the one small catch with Roagna is that the wines tend to demand an unusually long rest in the cellar before they open up and reveal their true brilliance. So, we are doubly thrilled that this wine has already enjoyed seven years of rest. Furthermore, the warm and generous 2009 vintage has blessed it with a uniquely young drinking window. I’ve never experienced a bottle of Roagna showing so beautifully in its youth. So, please take this opportunity to drink one of Barbaresco’s top wines without waiting two decades!
As I have written before, Roagna is a small family producer located in Castiglione Falletto, Barolo, with holdings in both Barbaresco and Barolo. The winemaker and umpteenth generation (this family has been making wine in Barbaresco before glass bottles existed!) head of the estate, Luca Roagna, is dedicated to organic farming and producing extraordinarily age-worthy single vineyard wines. Alongside Cappellano and Conterno, wine professionals regard Roagna as one of the top three or four truly traditional producers in the region. The family’s rolling, sweeping hillside vineyards in Barolo and Barbaresco are farmed in strict accordance to organic principles and are left relatively wild. When I was in Barbaresco a few years ago, on a vineyard tour with Aldo Vacca from Produttori del Barbaresco, I looked up at the Cru named “Paje” and noticed that one vineyard was overgrown. It was as if a gorgeous, verdant forest had sprung up in the middle of an otherwise rigid-looking hillside of vines. I asked whose vineyard it was and of course, the answer was Roagna. Luca's vineyards are a healthy and beautiful example of nature amidst a sea of chemical farming and monoculture. This style of farming—in which incredibly tall native grasses, flowers, indigenous wild herbs and mycorrhizae are encouraged to flourish—is not typical in this region. This vineyard philosophy is indicative of Luca's respect for biodiversity, his desire to produce wine from vineyards that thrive in their natural environment, and his strong conviction that this is how to make the truest and most moving expression of Barbaresco and Barolo.
This bottling originates from that same Pajé vineyard—one of Barbaresco’s undisputed “Grand Crus” and for good reason. Pajé is in many ways the idealized Piemontese vineyard site. The vineyard has been producing wine grapes since before Barbaresco existed as a wine region and its current collection of 45-100 year old Nebbiolo vines are planted in some of the most dense limestone and calcareous marl in all of Barbaresco. The vineyard sits at around 1,000 feet elevation and enjoys a steep incline and beautifully amphitheatre-like shape that maximizes drainage and exposure to sun while protecting vines from the region’s fierce winds. Perhaps most importantly, the Tanaro River forms the vineyard’s lowest border, providing necessary thermal insulation from summer and winter temperature extremes. In short, this is one of the most perfect, revered and time-tested pieces of vineyard real estate in northern Italy.
In addition to his defiantly natural farming techniques, Luca is about as old school and traditional a winemaker as I’ve ever seen in the region. He ferments and macerates the grapes, with the skins on, in large Slavonian oak casks for up to 100 days. This extraordinarily lengthy maceration extracts yet another layer of flavor and tannin, provides more structure, and imparts the wines’ near limitless aging potential. As a result, Roagna Barbaresco typically requires considerable time in bottle before opening. Still, fortunately for us, the 2009 Barbaresco Pajé is just entering its long and generous “sweet spot” drinking window due to a generously warm summer and Luca’s masterfully gentle touch in the cellar.
The 2009 Roagna Barbaresco Pajé is gorgeous in the glass with deep red and earth tones, and a richness and visual depth which comes from being completely unfiltered. Aromas of red currant, dried cherries, black truffle, fine pipe tobacco and mint, dried roses and calf’s leather envelop the senses as they rise from the glass. As is often the case with Roagna’s best wines, the palate is the star of the show here; it has an energy and verticality that is truly rare in Barolo or Barbaresco. Flavors levitate above the palate with impossibly soft tannins before exploding with a long, structured finish. This is not a bombastic, over-the-top modern Barbaresco; it is all about texture, subtlety and whisper soft detail—Barbaresco for lovers of fine Burgundy, if you will. While it is delicious, bursting from the bottle and drinking more generously than any young bottle of Roagna I’ve ever opened, it is still wise to decant this wine for two hours before drinking at roughly 60-65 degrees. You can put the decanter in the refrigerator if it gets too warm sitting out. I encourage you to pour this bottle during the holidays—perhaps decant it during the afternoon over the next few weeks while you prepare a feast. Serve in large Burgundy stems and rest assured that this wine will sing with all manner of rich, rustic Italian cuisine—
Spaghetti alla Carbonara, Osso Buco, Red Wine Braised Veal. Truly, you can’t go wrong with one of the top wines in Barbaresco, entering it’s sweet spot and ready to rip!
