The Enigma of 2018 Barolo

BY ANTONIO GALLONI | FEBRUARY 08, 2022

Two thousand and eighteen is without a doubt the most erratic, frustratingly inconsistent Barolo vintage I have encountered in twenty-five years of visiting the region and a lifetime of drinking these wines. It is a vintage with some hits, many misses and highly variable quality throughout. Even so, with care readers will find a number of gorgeous wines among this year’s new releases.

It was a tough year in the vineyard, as we will explore later on in this report. Quality is all over the place. The best 2018 Barolos bring to mind vintages like 2012 and 1998, years in which the top wines are undeniably attractive, but without the personality of truly great vintages. Those are the hits. For the misses, it is a totally different situation. I tasted a number of 2018 Barolos that are washed out and diluted. To find wines like this in Piedmont we have to go all the way back to the early 1990s and vintages such as 1991, 1992 and 1994.

Not surprisingly growers made very different choices. A number of producers did not bottle all of their vineyard-designates. These include Massolino, Trediberri and Oddero, who blended all but their Brunate and Vigna Rionda into their straight Barolo. For the third consecutive vintage Roberto Conterno will not release a Monfortino. But many producers did bottle their entire range, with various degrees of success. Some, like Gaja and Elio Grasso, bottled their Barolos in drastically reduced volumes. At the far opposite end of the spectrum, Marco Parusso made all of his Barolos, plus three Riservas.

Some may try to pass off the 2018 Barolos as easygoing wines, i.e. wines that are good for restaurants. Be careful. While that generalization is certainly true for some 2018s, the reality is that the market will soon be awash with a number of weak, emaciated 2018 Barolos that discerning readers will want to avoid.

A panoramic late fall view of vineyards in Monforte, with Serralunga in the background.

Why, Why, Why?

There is little doubt the 2018s are extremely inconsistent, both in terms of quality and style. The question is: Why?

Every vintage is a puzzle. Putting together the pieces of that puzzle is the part of this job I enjoy most. Each visit and each tasting provides clues to the big picture. After a few tastings, an early view starts to form, a sort of hypothesis. Then, over the ensuing tastings, those first impressions are either confirmed and refined, or perhaps re-evaluated. While each grower is intimately familiar with their own wines, few have tasted many of their colleagues’ wines at this stage. The value of the critic is ultimately the ability to collect dozens of viewpoints from a wide range of perspectives and distill them into a cohesive opinion. Sometimes that is easy, sometimes it is not so easy. Vintage 2018 clearly fits in the latter category.

In tasting, the 2018 Barolos – even the best examples – don’t have the depth and layers found in important vintages, although some come very close. Those wines seem to reflect the richness of a very warm summer in their fruit profiles. The wines are forward, but not overdone.

A second group of wines presents a classic feeling of austerity. It is tempting to make comparisons with 2014, but the best wines of that year had more finessed tannin, gorgeous inner sweetness and a level of aromatic intensity that is not found in the 2018s, wines that are instead often marked by light to medium-bodied structures, even within the context of Nebbiolo, and unpolished tannins.