Vinous Tasting Group - The Wines of Bruno Giacosa

BY ANTONIO GALLONI | AUGUST 1, 2017

I was thrilled to receive an invitation to join a group of avid Piedmont lovers, many of whom I have known personally since the early days of Piedmont Report, for this remarkable tasting of wines from Bruno Giacosa. We all brought bottles from our cellars organized around several loose themes and enjoyed them over a delicious dinner at DeGrezia in New York City. Founding Vinous has been incredibly gratifying for many reasons, not the least of which is seeing the lifelong friendships that are formed by wine lovers with shared interests.

My father introduced me to the wines of Bruno Giacosa when I was in high school. In those days, my parents owned a food and wine shop. They sold a number of top wines, but my dad always had a gleam in his eye when he brought a bottle of Giacosa Barolo or Barbaresco home for dinner. As I got older, I often turned to the Arneis or the more affordable Dolcetto, Barbera and Nebbiolo d’Alba bottlings before I graduated to being able to afford the Barolos and Barbarescos myself.

Numerous visits with Giacosa and his longtime winemaker Dante Scaglione remain vividly etched in mind as some of the greatest tastings of my life. Even though being late is part of Italian culture, I was never late to a tasting with Bruno Giacosa. I did not want to miss a single minute spending time tasting with him, which I regarded as a privilege. The setup was always the same. A large strip of butcher paper covered a long rectangular table that gradually became covered with glasses as we tasted through numerous wines in bottle and barrel. Scaglione methodically jotted his impressions down directly on the paper. I preferred a laptop. Even before he fell ill, Bruno Giacosa was a man of very few words. The suggestion of a smile occasionally appeared, but only when a wine particularly pleased him. Pointed questions elicited short, succinct replies. Even so, Giacosa’s immense pride in his work was evident. Words were not really necessary. The feeling in the room was more than enough to understand everything. I often walked out of that tasting room with goose bumps. The wines were every bit that emotional. And the quality of the young wines was always evident from the very first taste.

Over the years, I have had the good fortune to taste most, if not all, of Giacosa’s masterpieces along with many wines from unheralded vintages that are testaments to his unique genius. Today, Giacosa remains one of the most heavily represented producers in my cellar. If he is not at the very top, it is only because I have depleted most of my stock of older vintages. It is no secret that the winery has floundered since the 2008 vintage, but, perhaps for sentimental reasons, I prefer to focus on the positive than the negative here. For more historical information on Bruno Giacosa and his wines, readers may want to revisit this comprehensive retrospective of the iconic Barbaresco Santo Stefano, which was held on two consecutive evenings in Piedmont last year. As always with a tasting such as this one, there were a few flawed bottles, but overall we were lucky to enjoy a wide range of stunning Barolos and Barbarescos.

The night gets off to an amazing start with these two exceptional wines. Bruno Giacosa made his first Barbaresco from Asili in 1967. Although Giacosa worked with many top-notch sites in the intervening years, amazingly, he did not make another Asili until 1990. In 1996 Giacosa purchased a plot in Asili and went on to produce a number of stellar Barbarescos from this storied vineyard. With its sandy soils, Asili is a a site that is ideally suited to Giacosa's search for aromatic intensity and inner sweetness, qualities that are found in all of his finest Barbarescos and Barolos.