Tasting Barolo

Yet
styles have evolved demonstrably in both regions over the
last generation, due to economic constraints as well as
contemporary taste evolution. Since the wine industry’s
watershed 199Os, certain vintners are sidestepping
traditional austerity seeking for an easier complaisance.
Moreover, the millennium vintage of Barolo, as elsewhere
throughout Europe, was considered a rich, ripe vintage,
touted widely as the ‘best’ since 1997. With hue and cry
both loud and persistent on these wines, they have arrived
on these shores as hot items and are expected to sell
rapidly. ‘Hot’ is literal as well as figurative: Barolos are
rarely envisioned for immediate drinking pleasure, but both
the 1997 and 2OOO vintages have been regarded as forward,
ripe and open.

Here’s how
Brookline Liquor Mart in Allston ran a Barolo tasting. This
brief report talks more to the tasting process than
prognostication on the wines’ rose-y (if not tar-ry)
futures.

the
SET-UP Elizabeth
Kane explains how the tasting came about. “When I arrived at
MS Walker from Veuve Clicquot in Manhattan last year, I came
with the understanding that to move an expensive portfoilio
of wines, you have to crack eggs to make an omelet, so to
speak. We were going to have to run tastings to move in
retail. MS Walker has a large Italian portfolio, and our
Piedmont selections are huge. I had about 3O Barolos to
choose from!

“Claudia Davis
is national brand manager for Mark di Grazia; they created
the job for her, and she started last fall. She’d worked at
Skurnick, a well-respected wholesaler/importer. She’d worked
with these wines for years.

“We chose to
partner with a few stores around the state. Not only was BLM
willing – Roger Ormon and his team were enthusiastic about
working with us – they also had a really good client base
that cellars wine, and also a great tasting space out back.
It was really a perfect store.

“We also
partnered with Hingham Wine Merchants. Dick Graham has a
lovely big house, and we held a walkaround tasting for 😯 of
his clients. Both Dick and Roger know how to speak to their
client base. Both tastings really worked and we sold a lot
of wine – and built some great partnerships. We decided to
make them a special offer to grease the kitty.”

BLM’s veteran
salesman, taster and newsletter writer, Roger Ormon
announced a tasting of eight newly released 2OOO Barolos via
email to his customer base. Those interested prepaid, by
phone or by web, a $2O fee by credit card. The 3O projected
slots filled up in a day or two. Even though most of the
wines had been landed and warehoused at MS Walker, BLM
offered them at the tasting itself at ‘pre-arrival prices’,
about 2O% less than the wines would be advertised the
following day in the newsletter and the same price as they
would be on the floor, if indeed they had not been all
snapped up before they could be binned.

TASTING
CONDUCT and COMMENTARY
At 6pm on a Wednesday – typically a slow day in the slow
week following Valentine’s Day – tasters assembled in BLM’s
spacious showroom, and were led to the back room for a
tasting of eight of the crop of 2OOO Barolos. Sharing emcee
duties were Ormon, MS Walker representative Elizabeth Kane
and Claudia Davis, whose firm (Mark di Grazia) imports
several of the wines. BLM staff had laid out platters of
cold cuts, cheeses, fruits, olives on a sideboard, and
placed baskets of baguette rounds and communal spit buckets
at strategic points on the extensive connected tables.
Tasters were both seasoned BLM clientele and new faces, such
as two enthusiastic interns at Harvard Medical School. The
wines were presented in approximate ascending order of
weight, complexity, price, and Wine Spectator point count.
Prices and ratings are omitted from this report. One Riedel
glass was afforded each taster; since servers poured the
undecanted but lightly aired wines at about one every 5 to 7
minutes, alongside interesting running commentary, tasters
had to make relatively swift assessments. The genial
commentators competed neither with each other, nor with the
wines. Kane drew some general notes, remarking on the Barolo
region’s typically cool summers and its never-over-the-top
fermentations, increasingly done in stainless steel among
the younger generation. She noted that the law dictates 24
months minimum of barrel aging, but that various producers
may opt to age their Barolos longer; further variables are
whether the oak is old or new, large or small (botte versus
barriques). Ormon, an ardent follower of Barolos since the
197O, waxed eloquent about the 1982 vintage (lovely, not
powerful) and its softer tannins. Davis was particularly
adept at calling attention to the characteristics of the
various villages’ terroirs. She also had had sufficient
firsthand exposure to Piemontese lifestyle to mention the
softening of social relations among centuries-old winemaking
families that may well parallel such directions in
winemaking. “The youngsters talk to each other,” she noted,
in contrast to the longstanding stuffy antipathy widely
attributed to brothers Aldo and Giacomo Conterno – or, to
the Northeast, Livio and Marco Felluga. “They hang out, hold
weekly tastings, discuss their new winemaking toys.” There
were even intimations that communication fault lines are
forming in Barolo, as elsewhere, along generational rather
than family lines: as youngsters exercise more contemporary
tastes and styles, they’re likelier to irk their own fathers
than annoy their peers in the neighboring
vineyard.

The
DEAL The sweet,
on-the-spot-only discount deal favored big spenders, as it
was offered only on full case orders. Several modest
purchasers (this writer included) banded to cobble together
a mixed case order. The ad-hoc coalition provoked continued
amiable discussion on the relative merits of the two
Grassos, Ratti, Vietti, and Alessandria. While the staff
cleared the tables and husbanded the leftover wine, we
munched cheese rinds, pate, and grapes, plumbed the dregs of
the pre-tasting Barbera, and talked when the wines’ dumb
periods (elegantly termed by Davis as their ‘cocoon phase’)
would kick in and how long they might last. Meanwhile, Ormon
retired with carefully preserved portions of the bottles to
taste in peace and write up his own notes for BLM’s on-line
newsletter; some of these are excerpted below.

AFTERTHOUGHTS
In years past, Barolos were considered blockbusters of
alcoholic, but today many of them are being tamed and
refined, carrying their 14 to 15% with considerable grace,
especially vis à vis recent olfactory onslaughts of
Amador and Cucamonga Zinfandels and heavenly hosts of Aussie
Shirazim.

Ormon said in
his tasting summary, “As a group, they showed considerable
saturation and black hues, ripe fruit aromas and flavors,
and broad mouth-feel rarely found in just-released examples
of the ‘king of wines’.” I recalled that, mid-tasting,
Davis, though preaching to the converted, couldn’t resist
telling us insiders that her dictum to uninitiated
Barolo-tasters – “Trust me! It’ll taste great in ten years!”
– usually met with blank stares. Ah, yes, we think piously,
ten years must seem eternity to America’s pop-‘n’-pour
culture. And yet the burning question for those of us who
traditionally hold traditional Barolos ten – yea, verily,
even twenty! – years before popping their corks remains:
“Will these modern Barolos age as well as their forebears?”
The consensus opinion was tantalizing, maddening: “We’ll
have to wait and see!”