1999 Barolo Ginestra Vigna Sorì Ginestra

Conterno-Fantino's 1999 Barolos have aged well. The 1999s saw 4-5 days on the skins and were aged in 100% new French oak barrels. The personality of the structured vintage, new oak tannins and the natural tannins of Ginestra combine to yield two massive Barolos. As good as the 1999s are, they remain wines from an era that rarely lives up to its early promise. Few growers are as meticulous in the field as Conterno-Fantino, so it is great to see the strides that have been made here over the last fifteen years.

Claudio Conterno and Guido Fantino made their 2002 Barolo just like they've made all of their recent wines, starting with a very diligent and severe selection in the vineyards, especially critical in 2002. “We vinified our parcels separately and aged the wines 24 months in 100% new barriques,” says Guido Fantino. “I was convinced we would bottle our single-vineyard selections up to the last minute. In the end, we combined our finished wines to make a single Barolo. Although we've certainly had much worse vintages than 2002 the press was so critical of the vintage that we didn't feel the market would be receptive to our top bottlings. To be honest, today I regret that decision. Someday I'd like to go back and do a large retrospective tasting of my wines and I won't have a 2002 Sori Ginestra.”

Based on the 1996 through 2000 vintages, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Guido Fantino's Barolo Sori Ginestra is one of the Piedmont's great wines, with its exhilarating combination of power and perfume. Fantino has added a new Barolo to his portfolio, from leased 40-year-old vines in Parussi, in Castiglione Falletto (his first vintage was 1997). The improvement in this cuvee between '97 and '99 was striking, and Fantino admitted that it took until 1999 "to get the vineyard right." I ventured the opinion that this wine may soon surpass Fantino's Vigna del Gris, which also comes from the Ginestra vineyard; Fantino reminded me that this latter 45-year-old parcel is in the process of being replanted (in 2000, he had just 30% of a normal crop here due to the replanting program). Fantino describes '98 and '99 as two very similar vintages "in the character of the nebbiolo." Two thousand, he went on, is a very elegant, feminine style of wine. But a moment later he told me that it's also massive and structured, with plenty of sweet tannins.