2007 Larigi

I was completely blown away by Elio Altare's 2007s. The wines show incredible purity of fruit, rich, textured personalities, soft tannins and sublime overall balance. This is one of the very finest young vintages I have tasted here. Interestingly the wines were much more open when I tasted them in New York in September 2009 than they were a few weeks later at the winery. I also was impressed with the white 2008 Cinqueterre, a wine Altare is making from impossibly steep vineyards in Liguria. The 2008 showed elements of Riesling-like minerality and tons of balance.

Although Elio Altare is best known for the superb Barolos he crafts from the Arborina and Brunate vineyards, his entire range is among the most consistently brilliant in Italy. This truly once in a lifetime retrospective tasting traced the development of Altare's Vigna Larigi, an old-vine Barbera made from a tiny one-hectare plot on the Arborina hillside. For the occasion Altare opened every vintage of Larigi from 1985 to 2006 - with the exception of the 1983 and 1984, which could not be located – a rare event by any measure, most importantly because Altare himself had never tasted so many vintages of the wine in one sitting. All of the bottles came from Altare's personal collection, meaning that provenance was unparalleled. Readers will note that I have refrained from providing drinking windows for that very reason, as it is nearly impossible to replicate the sheer joy and profoundness older, perfectly-stored bottles offer. Still, there is a more important lesson to learn here, and it is that if purchased upon release and stored properly, top vintages of Larigi are capable of providing 20+ years of fine drinking. Needless to say, this tasting provided a unique look at the career of one the world's great vignerons. Altare remains perhaps the most ardent proponent of the modern school of winemaking in Piedmont. He was among the first producers to shorten fermentation times radically, use French oak for his wines and demonstrate that Barbera could yield wines of far greater pedigree than the over-cropped, acidic versions that were the norm when he was starting out. Altare's role in inspiring an entire younger generation of growers to estate-bottle their wines and leave behind the production of grapes and bulk wine can't possibly be overestimated. One of the frequent criticisms hurled at Altare over the years was that his wines wouldn't age. That misguided view has been proven wrong time and again by the splendid maturation of Altare's Barolos from the 1980s, as it was again on this day with a simply superb set of Barberas. As Larigi ages, it takes on a surprising level of complexity in its aromas and flavors, and the 100% new French oak becomes virtually undetectable, especially in the very finest vintages.