Tasty reads

Barolo: the vintages

August 22, 2011

Barolo, like any other wine, lives and dies, or ripens. Depending on its provenience, it ripens in four years, it gets better when it’s around six, in full shape until it’s ten-twelve years old. Then it slowly becomes older and older, losing its color and verve. The ripening of a wine could be compared to a man’s life.

When it’s rightly mellow Barolo loves company; it’s the time when it has to go to the table with his friends, roasts. Then it becomes more discreet and solitary, just like great persons, great artists. A bottle’s value doesn’t depend on its age, but on the year in which the wine was born! The wheather situation has a great influence on the vegetative cycle of vineyards. Every year corn, wheat, etc., though they can produce more or less cereal, give us an unchanging “polenta” or bread; vineyards instead can give a different wine every year. This is the reason of the search for perfect wines, extraordinary, the reason for high prices of bottles that contain wine produced in a year when the harvest ( i.e. the year in which it was produced) was extraordinary”.

taken out by “The Barolo as I feel”, M. Martinelli – ed. Sagittario

Wine vintage descprition 1968 – 2000

1868 – 1910

1911 – 1950

1951 – 1989

1990 – 2000