2019 Barolo Ravera

Vietti’s 2019s are off the charts. I can’t say I am totally surprised, as I have been following the wines for several years. At the same time, it is one thing to taste wines from barrel and another entirely to see the finished, bottled wines in front of you. I tasted each wine from two bottles, one opened two hours before my arrival and another opened when I arrived. This year, I preferred the opened bottles for most wines. From the first wine to the last, the 2019s possess tremendous depth and purity, along with the deep inflections of site that are what Barolo is all about. Readers who can find these wines should not hesitate, as they are truly magnificent.

“Harvest ran from October 8 to 16, which is pretty typical for us,” Luca Currado explained at Vietti. “It was a nerve-wracking vintage, the kind of vintage that gives you a lot of grey hairs. We made a lot of decisions on pure instinct. Our longest macerations were on the Brunate (30 days) and Lazzarito (27 days). Still, we shortened macerations by about a week on the Brunate, Rocche and Villero because we did not want to extract any bitterness in the tannins.” All the wines saw submerged cap maceration except the Monvigliero, where one of the two parcels did see submerged cap maceration while the other did not. Malolactic fermentation was done in cask, except for the Rocche, where the logistics of juggling casks of different sizes resulted in some of the wine doing the malolactic in neutral French oak.