2020 Barolo: Part Two

BY ANTONIO GALLONI | SEPTEMBER 24, 2024

This update rounds up our Barolo coverage for 2024, the majority of which was published earlier in the year. As usual, my early fall report focuses on wines that were bottled this past summer, along with several emerging estates that are new to our pages.

The 2020 Barolos Redux

Readers may want to look back at my article, 2020 Barolo: Selective Excellence, published in January 2024, for a blow-by-blow account of the 2020 growing season and wines. My opinion of 2020 has not changed since then. I see 2020 as a very good, if somewhat variable, vintage. There aren’t too many wines that truly ascend into the stratosphere. At the same time, many of the entry-level Barolos, which are increasingly being bottled with village designations, are flat-out delicious and ideal for near to medium-term drinking.

It has become common to hear that 2019-2020-2021 are like 1999-2000-2001. That has a ring to it, I must say. If it were only so easy. Serious Nebbiolo lovers will find this comparison overly simple and superficial. The late 1990s and early 2000s were a period where many growers sought to make powerful, concentrated wines through yields that today are considered abnormally low and heavy extractions in the cellar that have pretty much been abandoned. The overwhelming majority of classically leaning producers had given their wines greater finesse than in the past when so many Barolos were massively tannic and unapproachable in their youth, something that is rarely the case today.