1998 Barbaresco Crichët Pajè

Roagna is clearly a throwback to an earlier time when the pace of life was both much slower and more closely aligned with an agrarian culture. The hallmarks of the house style include late harvests from old-vine plots located in the Pajé vineyard in Barbaresco as well as the Rocche and Pira cru in Castiglione Falletto. The estate prides itself on meticulous work in the vineyards and yields are kept quite low. In the cellar the approach is ultra-traditionalist with macerations on the skins lasting anywhere from a minimum of 50 days for the entry-level Barolos and Barbarescos to an unheard of 75 days for the top bottlings of both wines. Roagna favors French oak barrels and the wines are aged for extended periods in both barrel and bottle prior to being released. The winery bottles three selections of Barbaresco, the Pajé, Pajé Riserva and Crichet Pajé as well as two selections the Barolo La Rocca e La Pira, a regular bottling and the Riserva. It is not clear to me that the Riservas necessarily represent a quality level that is meaningfully higher than that of the regular bottlings. In fact on some occasions I have found the top selections to be over-extracted and lacking fruit, while the regular bottlings often display better overall balance. These are big, powerful, classically structured wines that will please readers in search of Barolos and Barbarescos made in a rigorously traditional style. Because Roagna has not received a lot of attention from the press the wines remain very reasonably priced considering the quality, something that has become all too rare these days….and you have to love an estate that is only now releasing its wines from such important vintages as 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999.