2019 Barbaresco

La Ca' Nova is, in my view, the single most under-the-radar winery in all of Piedmont. The wines just keep getting better and better, yet prices remain exceedingly modest, especially within the context of today’s market. Marco Rocca’s 2019 Barbarescos are every bit as monumental as they were last year. The 2020s are also very fine and pure but appear to have a bit less volume and overall structure. Long macerations with submerged cap fermentation and aging in cask are the norm. In 2020, Rocca shortened the period of extraction by a few days vis-à-vis the 2019s, and also bottled the wines a bit earlier. I left bottles of the 2020s opened for a few days, over which they just got better and better. I can’t recommend these wines highly enough.

La Ca' Nova has been one of the hottest wineries in all of Piedmont over these last few years. Readers will find two superb vintages in the 2019s and 2018s. The 2019s are sensational, while the 2018s are a testament to what was possible in a much more challenging vintage. The 2019s saw very long ferments of up to 55 days including submerged cap maceration. Malos proceeded quickly. As a result, some were done in tank and others finished in cask. "Two-thousand eighteen saw slow ripening until mid-September, then everything happened very fast. In 2019, on the other hand, we had a much more even ripening profile," Marco Rocca explained. "Skins were thinner in 2018. We saw them starting to degrade in the tanks pretty quickly, so we took the wines off the skins earlier. We gave the crus 16-17 months in barrel instead of 20-22, which is more typical for us and what we did in 2019." Stated simply, I can't recommend these wines highly enough, especially for readers who enjoy deep, classically structured Barbarescos.