1997 Barolo Monprivato Ca D'Morissio Riserva

Mauro Mascarello loves the 1999 vintage, but notes that the wines are a bit tough and hard to taste today. They're more structured than the '98s, he adds, but also rich and fat. Vintage 2000 was a hot year, and a good September with some well-timed rainfall resulted in sugar-laden grapes with very good phenolic maturity. The wines are easier than the '98s, whose tannins are not as round as those of the '99s or '00s, Mascarello adds. The 2001s were also very ripe, he told me, and the crop level was high. Unfortunately, Mascarello did not present the 2001s; rather, he showed me essentially the same Barolos I tasted two years earlier, though of course this time the 1999s and 2000s were in bottle. (Douglas Polaner Selections, New York, NY; W. J. Deutsch & Sons, White Plains, NY; and Classic Wine Imports, Brookline, MA)

I continue to be charmed by Mauro Mascarello's superb Barolo Monprivato, from Castiglione Falletto, a scented, aromatically fascinating wine that's typically understated in its youth but shows a classical Barolo evolution with 10 or 15 years in the bottle. The Ca d'Morissio, from a portion of the Monprivato hillside replanted in 1988 with a selected clone of michet, may be even more perfumed than the "regular" Monprivato. Mascarello describes it as a more feminine style of wine, with more sweetness in its youth, but a couple of the vintages I tasted in September seemed especially penetrating and backward. The Ca d'Morissio is likely to become one of the region's stellar examples as the vines mature.Mascarello's favorite recent vintage remains the 1996; he allows that the following four vintages fall a bit short in structure and power. "Ninety ninety-seven is an elegant wine with decent structure," Mascarello told me, "while '98 is harmonious and nicely balanced. The '99s are round, elegant wines. Technical ripeness came early but real ripeness of polyphenols came later. So we had lots of alcohol without a huge structure. For many people, wood tannins had a tendency to dry these wines. Two thousand is a good year, not far off in style from 1999, but without great structure or aging potential."