Breakfast of Champions, Day I

Breakfast of Champions

Following are my notes from my recent week-long trip to Italy completed yesterday. It's only Day One. There are six more to go!

Piemonte, May 15-22
Sunday Evening, May 16th

At the risk of violating the copyright for Wheaties (or Kurt Vonnegut’s for that matter), I defy anyone to surpass wines made from the Nebbiolo grape as a preferred way to break fast. In fact, our small group consumed some 350 different versions over four days of tasting, all before lunch! The other 200 or so wines were consumed in formal afternoon tastings at various locations, featuring old vintages, and also at many ad hoc winery visits, extra-curricular lunches, and dinners that followed. Basically, a f**kload of Nebbiolo was consumed, much to the delight of the organizers of Nebbiolo Prima, our hosts for the week.

Nebbiolo Prima is a loose conglomeration of Nebbiolo producers from the Barolo, Barbaresco and Roero zones, loosely (in an Italian sort of way) under the auspices of Albeisa (now presided over by the amiable Enzo Brezza) and the Consorzio di Tutela Barolo, Barbaresco, Alba, Langhe e Roero- headed up by Pietro Ratti) The producers pitch in funds every year to organize a grand week of intensive tastings and ancillary events for invited buyers and journalists, highlighting current vintages from the region and trotting out some older ones in the hopes that we’ll go back to our home countries and spread the word. So here I am! Spreading the word!

I mean, how could I not? Nebbiolo? Prima? Two of my favorite things!

The event began in, and was centered around, the city of Alba, one of Piemonte’s real gems. An opening party was held Sunday evening in the commandeered Piazza Savone, in the center of the city, and featured a grand selection of local whites and sparkling wines, buffet tables groaning with antipasti and a selection of local DOP cheeses, live music and a deadening slide show offered up by the Albeise bottle people, one of the event’s major underwriters. I got to Malpensa rather late, having left London at 2:30, renting a really cool Fiat Punto (150 km/hour on the autostrada, no sweat!) and making my way west with only a very vague idea of where I was going. I arrived just as the party was breaking up (and, unfortunately just as the Albeisa bottle video was starting), had a glass of Favorita, some smoked meats, a few bites of cheese and decided to drag my sleepy ass off to my hotel.

Driving in Italy, by the way, is a lot of fun. I know it gets a bad rap and I wasn’t, mind you, trying to negotiate roundabouts in central Roma with thirty angry Vespas buzzing on my tail, but the roads are clearly marked, for the most part in really good shape, and I found my fellow drivers to be uniformly courteous and polite. The new Italy! With the exception of a few notable bottlenecks, the streets of Alba are wide and clean and the roads in the wine country lots of fun to drive on. Of course that doesn’t mean this wasn’t Italy! One line-painting crew seemed to haunt me wherever I went and consisted of about thirty orange-clad smoking guys watching one of their party run a painting machine that laid down thick white paint over the old, faded road lines. Of course this also meant blocking half the road at a time when they did the crosswalks, creating a sort of two-way slalom effect which, when involving lots of oncoming trucks, made for some true road excitement.

In hindsight, I should have brought my annoying tom-tom or found some other GPS device to use. Even though the roads were nicely marked, it’s easy to get lost like I did, going from the opening party to the hotel, theoretically only ten minutes’ drive from the square. Ten minutes it is if you don’t circumnavigate the entire city of Alba first. After stopping first at a gas station and then at a gelateria, I finally found myself on what, in the daylight, proved to be a really beautiful, very windy, road rising through the Diano d’Alba hills to Benevello, one of the highest spots in the Langhe and home to the four-star Albergo Villa d’Amelia. I awoke at dawn to a stunning view from both windows of my corner room. Dominating the north-facing window at daybreak (don’t ask….I sleep terribly on these trips) was Mon Viso, the snowy crag featured at the beginning of every Paramount Pictures movie, and the rest of the Alps. Quite a way to wake up! I took a long walk to the town (if you can call it that) of Benevello, some twenty minutes up the hill and one of the highest points in the area, to see its medieval castello (not much left other than a wall and an intriguing-looking trattoria) and Renaissance-era church. The views from there, however, are unparalleled.

Monday, May 17th

At breakfast (the usual assortment of croissants, smoked meat, cheeses, granola, yogurt, juices and such that you find just about everywhere in Italy) I met the other buyers staying at the inn, including old friend John Downing, an LA retailer, Henry, the wine director at Del Posto in New York, Eric and Mao, he from Donatella in San Francisco and she a retailer in San Jose, Aussie wine importer David Lynch, Joanne Noto, a restaurant buyer from Grand Rapids Michigan, Brad, my doppelganger from Primo Vino (no, not Prima Vini) near Denver and an assortment of other retail and restaurant people numbering around 15. Then it was on the bus and off to Alba’s slick Ampelion, a wine and grape school and research center funded by the government, growers and producers of the area and, as it turned out, our private torture chamber. It was in the large open room at the center of the Ampelion where four Italian sommeliers, four young student assistants and a table laden with 86 open bottles of Nebbiolo awaited our arrival.

The tastings were fairly straightforward and the first day’s lineup started with the 2007 vintage of Roero and gradually segued to the 2007 vintage for the Barbareschi from the villages of Alba, Barbaresco and Treiso with, just for kicks, five 2005 Barbaresco Riservae. With little fanfare, while we sat there dumbfounded, gawking at the list, the Somms began their evil task, filling our five glasses with a seemingly endless succession of Nebbiolo while we swirled, gargled and spit ‘em back, scribbled notes and went on to the next. Every few flights the assistants would whisk away our overflowing spit buckets and replace them with empties. There was a napkin full of grissini, the local breadsticks I love so much, and an endless supply of Aqua Naturale, but nothing else separating us from the onslaught of Nebbiolo we were facing.

The wines were provided by the contributing producers, some 190 of them. Most all of the big names and many of the small ones were present, but I should point out that there were some wineries that declined to participate in the event and hence I did not taste them. Not seeing a particular name in my list of favorites does not imply that I did not like it; it may be that I simply didn’t taste it! But that list is small. On the first day, for instance, the only two names I can think of that weren’t present were Gaja and Rivetti.

Before the tasting, some interesting facts were noted about recent law changes, unique examples, I think, of Italian inmates running the asylum. The producers of the mainly Dolcetto wines in Diano d’Alba and Dogliani have decided, in their wisdom, to eliminate the word Dolcetto from their appellations. Dolcetto, they say, is a grape much maligned for its name, which many interpret to mean sweet. By eliminating it, they say, it will highlight their terroir rather than the grape name. Of course, what this means to me is that Diano and Dogliani will now take their place next to the other geographically-named appellations of the region: Barbaresco, Barolo and Roero, all three of which use Nebbiolo exclusively. What’s a consumer going to think about Diano or Dogliani? I think they are barking up the wrong tree on this one.

Alba has also jumped in to get its own DOC, which appears to be a catch-all term for anything made in the region that doesn’t qualify as one of the better appellations because a) they are using non-traditional grapes like Cabernet, or b) they want to declassify a wine or sell it at a non-DOCG sort of price but want it to have more cachet than, say, Nebbiolo della Langhe. Nothing like keeping it simple, folks.

And here’s the Only-In-Italy rule: Roero, which lobbied hard to get its own name so it would be perceived on a par with Barolo and Barbaresco, was successful in the endeavor only by including a 5% addition of Arneis to the DOCG blend to diversify itself from those two. That was the rule. However, in practice, not one winemaker I asked ever actually added Arneis to his Nebbiolo. I mean, why would they? So, this year, in their wisdom, they eliminated the requirement. Uh, ok.

I made notes for everything I tasted (I used up an entire pen!) and scored them with my usual *-**** star rating. I use (-) or (+) when I think I might have room one way or another and I usually save my **** for wines that completely blow me away, something that just doesn’t happen in a tasting of this sort. In the interest of space, I’ve decided only to mention here the wines I scored *** or higher, as these are solid recommendations that no one, I think, would be unhappy with. In the event something was particularly disappointing, I’ll mention that, too.

But first, some general comments about the first day’s tasting. I won’t write about the specifics of the 2007 vintage here, as there are plenty of other pundits out there who have written of them, and I’d just be copying. It was, by all accounts, though, a very good, if very ripe, one. I found it, in the Roero and Barbaresco, an interesting and confounding one. It certainly scored high for drinkability, as there were few wines that weren’t succulent and delicious; however, unlike Barolo, as I will get to later, as a group these wines lacked a certain Nebbiolo-ness. In other words, they were ripe to the point where the essential seductive characteristics of the Nebbiolo grape becomes masked by a level of concentrated fruit (and elevated alcohol) that leaves one wondering where they would have fit in had the tasting been blind and other grapes been included. Roero, in particular, had a rough go of it. I think the winemaking here is still rather immature and no consensus of style has emerged. If you used too much barrique in 2007, for example, you made a particularly generic sort of red, good to drink but not at all thrilling to the Nebbiolo purist. I am not meaning to tar the entire vintage (so to speak) with one brush, but one has to be a bit careful when purchasing these 2007s if one’s goal is long-term cellaring. There are, as you can see from the notes below, still plenty of nice wines from which to choose.

In tasting these wines I focused on three benchmarks I established for the vintage and put each wine on an imaginary line graph with marks for where it fit in….if a given wine surpassed the average on each count, it got its ***! It ain’t rocket science, but when tasting this many wines, it became very easy. I looked for the following:
-Fruit: sour (Morello) cherry that ran to darker, almost chocolate cherry fruit the riper it got. The best had a touch of austerity with something like fennel seed leaning towards pine resin in there.
-Tannins- on almost all, they spread out at the back of your mouth. The best had nice ripe tannins that seemed to flow naturally from the density of the texture. A leaner wine with a lot of crisp tannin doesn’t bode well in my mind, but there were a few of those.
-Freshness. In a vintage like 2007, fresh acidity could be an issue. My favorites may have been ripe, had a ton of fruit, generous oak and such, but also good freshness. It’s a point in this vintage.

***+
2007 Cascina Morassino Barbaresco Ovello- Wow! Is this ever good!
2007 Ca’ du Rabaja Barbaresco Rabaja- juicy, well-filled, oaky, luscious
2005 Produttori del Barbaresco Riserva Rio Sordo- a complex, classical wine

***
2007 Az Ag Cornarea Roero Rosso- oaky and sweet
2007 Bel Colle Roero Rosso Monvije- powerful but balanced
2007 Negro Angelo e figli di Giovanni Negro Roero Rosso Prachioso- herbal, complex
2007 Fabrizio Battagliano Roero Rosso Sergentin- beautiful
2006 Monchiero Carbone Roero Riserva Printi- complete
2006 Matteo Corregio Roero Riserva Ampsej- balanced and complete
2006 Negro Angelo Roero Riserva Sudisfa
2007 Az ag Molino Barbaresco Teorema- sweet fruit
2007 Orlando Abrigo Barbaresco Valgrande- concentrated, woody
2007 Eredi Lodali Barbaresco La Casa in Collina- Cab-like, curranty
2007 Az Ag Pelissero Barbaresco Ausario- complete, gorgeous
2007 Pertinace Barbaresco Vigneto Nerve- woody, sweet, good drink
2007 Grasso Fratelli Barbaresco Vallegrande- easy to love
2007 Pertinace Barbaresco Marcaini- exuberant and fresh
2007 Sottimano Barbaresco Pajore- linear, complex
2007 Cantina del Pino Barbaresco- perfumed, exotic
2007 Produttori del Barbaresco- powerful, intense, complete
2007 La Spinona Barbaresco La Spinona- Bricco Faset- plumy, oaky
2007 Montiribaldi Barbaresco Sori Montiribaldi- soft but balanced
2007 Marchese di Gresy (Tenute Cisy Asinati) Barbaresco Martinenga- juicy, round
2007 Albino Rocca Barbaresco Vigneto Brich Ronchi- plenty of everything!
2007 Cortese Giuseppe Barbaresco Rabaja- sweet, balanced
2007 Bruno Rocca Barbaresco Rabaja- simply stellar
2005 Piazzo Armando Barbaresco Riserva Nervo Vigna Giaia- blockish, earth, tar
2005 Nada Giuseppe Barbaresco Riserva Casot- juicy and balanced

Do you want to see my disappointments, too? Of course you do. No one wants to see only the good stuff! Here are some names that didn’t perform well for me.

2007 Giovanni Almondo Roero Bric Valdiana (but their Arneis rules!)
2007 Albino Rocca Barbareco……two corked bottles and one that was impossibly lean
2007 Prunotto Barbaresco….earthy, stinky….no.
2007 Rattalino Barbaresco…..how could you like a wine called Rattalino!
2007 Bruno Rocca Barbaresco….first bottle corked, second was weird
2007 Michele Chiarlo Barbaresco Asili….primary, brutal!
2005 Produttori del Barbaresco Barbaresco Riserva Pora ….was it corked?

Shoot…..four pages and still before lunch on Day One!

We took the bus to the Albergo dell’Agenzia at the University of Pollenzo for a much-needed buffet lunch and another tasting, this time with the producers themselves showing up to four wines each, including where possible, wines from vintage 2000, now 10 years old. This tasting was a walk-around with people filtering in and out of the room as the hours progressed.

Noted: the tasting was to highlight the 2000 vintage in Roero at ten years old. The results? Not so good. The wines, taken as a group, were far advanced with fading fruit and still very grippy tannins. Of course, ten years ago, many of the winemakers in this room were barely out of diapers and Roero still seems to me to be a decade behind its older neighbors in terms of track record and confident winemaking. They get a pass. The Barbareschi in the room were better but still not of the character that made me excited about having a cellar full of them. What was up with the Wine Spectator rating that vintage in Piemonte 100 points? Of course, the 2000 Baroli have yet to be tried, but there are some serious questions here.

I didn’t find any wines in the afternoon tasting I would mention here other than several duplicates of the 2007s that I liked from the earlier session. Ca’ de Rabaja is a real find in Barbaresco. I understand that they will be imported into California this summer, and I will be first in line. I also noted that the 1999 Malvira Roero Monbeltrame, the only 1999 in the room, was a lovely testament to what a good vintage that was. Compared with Malvira’s lean, green and bitterly tannic 2000, the 1999 was everything an eleven-year-old wine should be, complex with balsamic, bitter cherry and fading roses. It was the exception that seemed to prove the rule about 2000.

After lunch, three of us, including the aforementioned Henry and David visited the famed cellars of Giuseppe Rinaldi in Barolo. While Beppe was in town doing something or other, we were shown around by his lovely school teacher wife and their daughter Marta, the heir apparent to the Rinaldi winemaking throne. Marta, 25, is fresh out of enology school and ready to go! Her Christmas present to her white wine-loving mom was to make a Riesling-based sparkling wine, the results of which are sitting in a riddling rack in the downstairs cellar. Mom has pronounced the wine ‘pretty good.’ The Rinaldi own 6.5 hectares split (not all evenly) among the Le Coste vineyard right across the street from the winery, the Ravera cru, a spot in Cannubi-San Lorenzo (the very top of Cannubi) and 2 ha in the Barolo part of Brunate. They are split into two cuvees: the winery’s signature Brunate-Le Coste and the Cannubi San Lorenzo-Ravera. We tasted from a 2007 cask of the latter that was simply ravishing. I didn’t want to spit. A 2007 Le Coste was really, really pretty and a sample of the 2007 Brunate was as close to Grand Cru Burgundy as you’ll ever get from Nebbiolo. Marta also opened for us a 1998 Brunate-Le Coste at my request. 1998 has become one of my favorite vintages of late and I wanted to see how the always late-blooming, traditionally-made Rinaldi was doing at 12 since I don’t have any myself. Mom called it a ‘rude’ vintage in the sense that it had big, angry tannins and acidity when young. And you know what? It still does. Dense still, the nose has barely begun to show the classic cardamom and spice characters I associate with this property, and the tannins and acidity are still very palpable. If you have any, put it away! Really nice was a 2008 Nebbiolo that had been bottled in April. Sweet fruit, svelte tannins and a lovely Burgundian character. The 2006 Brunate-Le Coste was sweet with cardamom and cinnamon, while the 2006 Cannubi-Ravera was a powerhouse.

Also tasted from the barrel: 2009 Barbera and 2008 Brunate.


I’ll have more to say about Marta and the rise of the young woman winemaker in Piemonte later, but it’s interesting to note that there are no stylistic or winemaking changes planned at this iconic traditional winemaking property despite the arrival of this well-trained, obviously very bright winemaking force. We can all take solace in that! And for more on Marta, check her out on YouTube searching for Le Rinaldi in Campo.

We were dropped back into Alba following the tasting only to be loaded on the bus for a barbecue out in the country featuring a score of Dolcetto winemakers and a load of meat. Dolcetto, the claim goes, is the perfect wine for barbecue, being fruit-driven with nice tannins and enough acidity to tame the fattiest beast. Still, much to the chagrin of the winemakers trying to create a constituency for the grape, for the money, even after (or maybe particularly after) drinking two dozen alongside grilled chicken, lamb, sausages and a magnificent hunk of Piemontese beef, I would rather drink Cotes du Rhone, Spanish Monastrell, Garnacha or Tinto de Toro-based reds, Aussie GSM or even American Zin at the backyard meat-a-thon. This is not to say there weren’t some fun wines amongst the two dozen, however, with favorites coming from Bruna Grimaldi, G D Vajra, Francesco Boschis and Punset.

Back on the bus and in bed by midnight. Total body count for the day? 133.