The Wine AdvocateRP 100Reviewed by: Monica LarnerRelease Price: $1000 for 0.75clDrink Date: 2027 - 2060
The Giacomo Conterno 2014 Barolo Riserva Monfortino is made with 100% fruit from the Francia cru, which is not the case for the 2015 vintage (that sees 22% Arione in the blend) or likely future vintages. In a sense, this 100-point wine represents a milestone or a chapter finale in the long and exciting trajectory of Italy's collected and revered Monfortino. I've had the great fortune of tasting this wine from barrel over the course of four years and twice again this summer during my visits to the Conterno estates (in Gattinara and in Monforte d'Alba). Roberto Conterno has long been referring to 2014 as "the vintage of his heart." There had been challenging rain during the summer, but by the end of August, Roberto knew that a window of warm and dry weather could make 2014 "the vintage of the century," he tells me. On cue, the skies opened, and the sun came shining through in September and lasted through harvest in the second half of October. As a result, this was a very long growing season and that is something the Nebbiolo grape loves most. You taste this in the tannic quality of the wine that is long, silky, elegant and firm. That quality texture and structure will carry this bottle over a half century of bottling aging, or more. From an analytical point of view, this 2014 vintage is the most tannic Monfortino made in 30 years, but you'd hardly know it thanks to the smooth integration displayed here. The wine's bouquet is nuanced and fine with redcurrant, mint, blood orange, toasted aniseed, baked clay and tarry smoke. Initially, you get a savory touch of succulent grilled meat that adds to the "chewy" quality of the wine that Roberto Conterno often attributes to his favorite vintages of Monfortino. A note about corks: Extreme care is dedicated to quality control, and each of the 4,000 to 5,000 corks ordered for this wine are sniffed by human noses on team Conterno before making the cut.
We know Roberto Conterno of the Giacomo Conterno estate as one of Italy’s most talented Barolisti, a taciturn genius in the vineyard and cellar who is capable of casting out the inner soul from the Nebbiolo grape and trapping it for near-eternal safekeeping in a glass bottle. But the Roberto Conterno I met this summer had reinvented himself during the doldrums of lockdown, moving toward increasingly varied pursuits. Thanks to this total transformation, his many new identities today also make him an architect, a restaurateur, a stemware designer and the inventor of a futuristic army of robots on tank treads that will be dispatched at random throughout the Italian countryside and beyond. (Sorry folks, on this last point, I have been sworn to absolute secrecy, but I promise to say more when I can).
As I discovered this past July, there is indeed a lot of news to report from Piedmont. I visited both of Roberto’s estates, his new winery in Gattinara (Alto Piemonte) and his historic cellars in Monforte d’Alba (Barolo), to taste the 23 wines reviewed in this report. What I thought would be a quick tour became instead an epic foray into Mondo Conterno.
I left Nice, France, in early morning and drove past the flooded rice patties of Arborio to the beautiful town of Gattinara, which sits south of the Italian Alps and the Lake District west of the Sesia River. Roberto came to greet me and told me that just 24 hours earlier the area had suffered from a terrible summer hailstorm. He was still assessing damage to his Nebbiolo vines planted a short distance north of the winery on the nearby hillsides.
Roberto purchased the historic Nervi winery in 2018. (For more info on this acquisition, you can read my May 2018 article called "Italy, Piedmont: The Nebbiolo Whisperer – Roberto Conterno Buys Gattinara’s Nervi.") By buying the estate, with its 27 hectares of vines and a winery in the city center of Gattinara (with roots spanning back to the early 1900s), Roberto sent the ultimate vote of confidence in Nebbiolo-based wines made in the often-overlooked appellation of Gattinara.
The man credited with making some of Barolo’s greatest wines, and arguably its most collectable icon wine, Monfortino, had unexpectedly set up shop in Gattinara. It was a move driven purely by instinct and passion.
His first step was to design and construct a new, state-of-the-art winery. No expense was spared, and Roberto reproduced the breakthrough technology we can admire today at his home-base winery in Monforte d’Alba in Barolo. In addition to the modern fermentation area and aging cellars, some of the older cement tanks and facilities left over from the original Nervi winery were refurbished and kept in place.
Understanding that wine might not be enough to draw visitors to this undiscovered corner of Piedmont, Roberto converted the front offices of the old Nervi winery into a restaurant called Cucine Nervi. It serves regional dishes with a contemporary twist. A smooth wooden counter made with imported kauri wood from New Zealand surrounds an open kitchen where you can watch the talented chef Alberto Quadrio and his team at work. The restaurant wine list of course offers an enviable collection of Conterno Neri and Giacomo Conterno recent releases and back vintages.
Roberto had prepared a beautiful tasting for me in the glass-enclosed visitors’ room with views of the barrel fermentation area below. From the Conterno Nervi portfolio, I tasted the 2018, 2017 and 2016 vintages of his Gattinara, plus the 2018 and 2016 vintages of his two single-vineyard wines, Molsino and Valferana. These wines were not made in 2017, and fruit from these sites went into the classic Gattinara instead. I also tasted the Nebbiolo-based rosé as well as the rosé metodo classico sparkling wine.
“Gattinara beats Barolo three to one in the 2018 vintage,” he tells me. “Nebbiolo is crazy sensitive to place, and the 2018 vintage gave beautiful tannic structure here, making for complete wines.”
Following his presentation from Conterno Nervi, Roberto poured wines from his Barolo brand, Giacomo Conterno. I had previewed many of these wines over the past years during my annual barrel tastings, but this was my first opportunity to taste the finished products. The lineup included the 2019 Barbera Vigna Cerretta and the 2019 and 2018 vintages of Barbera d’Alba Vigna Francia.
In terms of Barolo, we sampled the 2017 and 2016 vintages of Barolo Cerretta, Barolo Arione and Barolo Francia. To conclude, he poured the 2014 and the 2015 Barolo Riserva Monfortino. Monfortino was not made in 2016 or 2017, and he hadn’t yet decided if he will make the wine in 2018.
“Barolo beats Gattinara in 2019; and in 2020, the two regions are about the same,” he says. “I love 2019 in Barolo. The season saw two full months of beautiful weather before harvest. The 2019 vintage made long-term wines with extra concentration and structure. The 2020 vintage has more obvious fruit and less structure compared to 2019.”
Roberto Conterno often takes conventional wisdom regarding a vintage and turns it on its head. He showed extreme confidence in the 2014 vintage, calling it “the vintage of the century”; meanwhile, it was largely panned by his peers because of summer rains and below average temperatures. That counterintuitive approach, which is part mischievous and part moxie, had him cheering for 2015 over the widely applauded 2016 vintage. Indeed, he had originally made one barrel of a possible 2016 Monfortino, but that wine ultimately went to his Barolo Francia instead.
The message delivered loud and clear this summer is that Roberto Conterno is especially excited about his 2019 Barolo wines now in barrel.
As a side gig, Roberto Conterno designs stemware. In 2017, he introduced his Sensory glass (which I use daily for all my professional tastings of reds and whites) with its extra wide balloon, soft tulip curve and short stem for better stability. This summer, I tasted sparkling wine from his newest glass, Symphony, introduced in 2021.
My last winery visit in Barolo before my flight back to Rome was with Roberto Conterno at Giacomo Conterno. This was my happy sendoff: Barrel tastings of Monfortino and an unforgettable sample of the 2010 Barolo Riserva Monfortino (a stunning 100-point wine) that reset my palate and stayed in my thoughts (and on my taste buds) for the entire length of my flight and transfer back home. With this final tasting completed, I knew I had experienced one of the finest groups of new releases ever (spanning from 2013 Barolo to 2010 Barolo Riserva)—not only from this celebrated estate but from the Barolo region as a whole. Roberto Conterno has a few more surprises up his sleeves. He is making Monfortino in 2013 and in 2014. In fact, he is only making Monfortino in those years. This is a huge endorsement for the controversial 2014 vintage in particular. He describes 2013 and 2014 as similar vintages that performed in opposite ways. The 2013 vintage was normal and warm during the height of summer but saw more cloud coverage and cooler temperatures in the fall. In 2014, the summer months were grey and soggy, but the fall period was warm and dry instead.
Here are my reviews of barrel samples tasted at the winery the last week of April. Among the samples is a new wine produced for the first time: the 2015 Barolo Arione, made with fruit from one of the estate's most high profile recent land acquisitions. Roberto Conterno will bottle all these wines on June 10th, just as we prepare to go to print. These wines will hit the market in October. When appropriate, I have given final scores to these wines, or a range of scores, accordingly. This year, I not only tasted new vintages, I got to taste from a new glass too. Roberto Conterno has designed new stemware called Sensory. With the help of his son who made 3-D computer designs from Roberto’s hand sketches, the Sensory glass offers these distinguishing factors: 1) The universal glass is used for both white and red wines; 2) The base of the balloon is almost flat, giving the wine a wider rest area at the bottom; 3) The side curve of the balloon is taller and wider, at a very open angle. This gives the wine more room to travel when you swirl the glass; and 4) The actual stem is on the short side, giving you the ideal distance between your fingers to hold the glass steady. My impression? Wow, this glass is to wine what high definition is to a television screen.
Two days before my scheduled annual tasting with Roberto Conterno, headlines in the Italian daily La Stampa broke the news that the maker of Monfortino had just purchased the 27-hectare Nervi property in the Gattinara appellation of Alto Piemonte. You can read more about this excellent chess move in the end-of-May interim issue, where I also review Nervi’s current vintages. Back in Monforte d’Alba, the soft-spoken Roberto Conterno hints at other big news to come. I asked if this might be new vineyard acquisitions in Barolo, but he wouldn’t say. But he did want to talk about (and taste) the treasures in his cellars. We can expect a lot of greatest to come from the Giacomo Conterno winery over the next few years. These are indeed exciting times for Roberto and his team. There are two vintages of precious Monfortino carefully evolving in botte: 2013 (to be released commercially in October of 2019) and the unexpected 2014. Monfortino was not made in the hot 2011 or 2012 vintages. It was last made in 2010 (I gave that vintage an enthusiastic 100 points). You may recall that bottle prices immediately climbed to nose-bleed heights, with some retailers reportedly selling their 2010 Barolo Riserva Monfortino for up to 1,200 euros a bottle. This caused a good amount of controversy and discussion within Italy, but it was seen as a milestone moment for many collectors outside of the country. I, for one, am happy to see that Italian wine can now reach the dizzying price heights of competitors in Bordeaux and Napa. Even though Monfortino will likely now and forever be priced beyond the means of most, I do think Roberto accomplished something very important with his stellar 2010 Monfortino that benefits Italian wine in the large scheme of things. One of the wines I tasted from botte this year is the 2015 Barolo Arione. Roberto asked me not to publish a review of this still non-existent wine, and for that reason, I will only report my impressions here without giving a score. Truthfully, it makes little sense to score this wine anyway since we are not yet sure where it will go. Will it be blended or will it stand alone? Roberto Conterno dropped more than a few hints that it could possibly end up in the 2015 Barolo Riserva Monfortino—if a 2015 Monfortino is made. As of this writing, no word has been given to either confirm or deny that Monfortino will be made in 2015. I want to be very careful with my wording because I appreciate how thoughtful and careful Roberto is when it comes to this iconic Barolo. The 2015 Arione fruit I tasted was in a closed phase, but it's very clear that the depth, power and potential is all there. So let's wait and see for now.Published: Nov 30, 2021
