Having banged on last week about the ever increasing price of Burgundy I find myself saying much the same about the wines of my blind test on Sunday, a Barolo – not that I was able to identify it.
TWS lists eight Barolos with a price range of £25 to £115 a bottle. They are also offering the 2015s em primeur at similar prices and you have to wait till around 2030 to start drinking them. I should live so long.
The bottle shown was not as exalted as most those noted above. It had a sweet, spirity nose and I couldn’t get any variety from the aroma – no smell of roses, for example, a nebbiolo characteristic. The wine was quite sharp and thin, still tannic, slightly smokey but without much complexity. Not bad though, as the palate adjusted. Barolo is one of those wines – like Chablis and Châteauneuf – that supermarkets offer hoping, we have always thought, to sell on the name, rather than the quality, which is often disappointing. This wasn’t in that category, just ‘ok’.
[Geoff: Four years ago, I wrote on the label ‘Good vintage. Keep 2019 – 2030.’ I don’t know where that information came from but the ’09 Barolo vintage reports are now mixed. I’m glad we drank it now. This was made by Ascheri for Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference range and, whilst the wine’s style wasn’t clumsy, heavy and tannic there was little subtlety. The nose was delicately floral with a slight mushroom note but the palate was one-dimensional. I’ve another ’09, time to drink it, I think.]