Today, we have a very precocious Piedmontese wine to share with you. Its makers are young and its source vineyard is unheralded, but you’d never know it after tasting this poised and perfumed Nebbiolo. This is a Langhe Nebbiolo with all the refinement and complexity of a top-tier Barolo, minus the tannic ferocity that can make young Nebbiolo a bit challenging sometimes, and while it is indeed a “debut” wine from Giovanna Bagnasco and Carlo Mondavi, its precociousness makes sense when you consider their respective wine lineages:
Giovanna and her sister, Serena, are now the faces of Barolo’s Agricola Brandini, in the village of La Morra, while Carlo Mondavi, son of Tim and grandson of Robert, produces acclaimed Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir under his RAEN label. The pair met several years ago, became a couple, and not too long after that, the Sorì della Sorba project was born. This 2019 is a Nebbiolo of exceptional finesse, aged in large Slavonian oak casks and blessed with tannins so refined you might for a moment think you’re drinking high-end red Burgundy. It’s almost as if a Barolo-maker from La Morra, the village known for the most elegant expressions of Nebbiolo, team up with a cool-climate Pinot Noir specialist…oh, wait, I said that already. This ’19 is mesmerizing now and promises to age gracefully for 10+ years—not too bad for a first try!
And while this Langhe Nebbiolo performs like an elite La Morra Barolo, it hails from a vineyard in the town of Diano d’Alba, on the other side of the Barolo DOCG zone. Only half of Diano d’Alba falls within the Barolo appellation boundary, and technically, the south-facing Sorì della Sorba site, measuring 1.2 hectares and perched at 450 meters, falls marginally outside the line. But when someone attaches the word sorì to a vineyard site—kind of a Piedmontese dialect answer to the word cru—they’d better deliver. This wine reminds me of the many “next door” wines of Burgundy we love so much at SommSelect; we’re talking about a vineyard that’s just a few hundred yards from some of the greatest Barolo crus in the region.
If I’m translating this correctly, the name Sorì della Sorba effectively means “hill of the Mountain Ash,” a reference to a tree known for its bright red berries and an apt choice for two winemakers who value their deep connection to nature. Agricola Brandini’s vineyards are now Certified Organic and Mondavi’s RAEN (an acronym for “Research in Agriculture and Enology Naturally”) is centered on a message of sustainability—not only do Carlo and his brother, Dante, eschew chemicals in the source vineyards, their winemaking practices are steadfastly natural, employing only native yeasts for fermentation and bottling wines unfined, unfiltered, and with the lowest amount of sulfur possible.
Giovanna and Carlo’s shared values are manifested in the Sorì della Sorba vineyard, in which they’ve begun to introduce biodynamic farming practices. Interestingly, they used a substantial percentage (70%) of whole grape clusters when fermenting this wine—not a practice typically associated with Nebbiolo—and aged the wine for about a year in large botti (vats) before bottling. As I said above, this is not your typical young, fierce Nebbiolo—there is indeed a nod to the crushed-velvet tannins and plush fruit of Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir in addition to all the rosy, peppery, leathery aromatics that make Nebbiolo so inimitable. The wine, though young, is already in beautiful balance, with only the subtlest hint of oak spice underpinning vibrant notes of wild red berries, wild strawberry, orange peel, rose petals, fennel, and forest floor. To me, it’s a great example of how the line between “traditional” and “modern” in Barolo has blurred to the point of extinction in some cases. The old school believed a young Nebbiolo needed to be bruisingly tannic to age, but we’ve since learned otherwise—and if a clean chord of ripe fruit layered over all that earth is considered “modern,” well, call me a modernist. Decant this wine 60 minutes before serving at 60-65 degrees in Burgundy stems and prepare to be wowed, especially if you take the time to cook something appropriate. Just 286 cases were made, so get in now and you’ll be saying “I knew them when…” in a few years’ time.
