1999 Barolo Sarmassa

Roberto Voerzio's 1999s were gorgeous when they were first released and are equally compelling today. There were plenty of challenges, including rain during the harvest, but Voerzio came through with a glorious set of wines.

While some critics of this domain fault Voerzio's very deeply colored wines for being overextracted and tannic, not to mention high in alcohol, I must confess to being genetically predisposed to Voerzio's bottles. Very low yields and complete phenolic ripeness are the keys to high quality here. Voerzio fancies the slightly jammy style of 2000 and 1997. He prunes to get just a kilo of grapes per vine, and thus, even in the large '97 harvest, crop levels were not excessive here. "A lot of '97s lacked acidity and structure due in part to the size of the crop," noted Voerzio. "Many of these wines are already in decline." Alcohol levels in the 1999s are in the 14.5% to 15% range, but there's little sign of heat in the aromas. Interestingly, Voerzio did his malolactic fermentations in barriques in '97, '98, '99 and '00 but went back to doing the secondary fermentation in stainless steel tanks in 2001. Voerzio, a longtime jazz lover, always has music blasting in the winery; on this occasion I tasted his bottled wines to the sound of Ennio Moricone's spaghetti western music - not a bad choice.