Giuseppe Cortese Barbaresco Rabajà MAGNUM 2017

Why is this Wine so Yummy?

Traditional version of the great Cru: a wine featuring structure, elegance and a personality of its own.

Barbaresco Rabajà is our most important wine and has an intense and ethereal perfume with fresh notes that evolve into scents of spices, tobacco and brushwood notes as it ages. A dry, full and robust flavour with a rich and harmonious structure; garnet red colour.

Grape variety: 100% nebbiolo

Surface area: in Barbaresco 4 hectares in the “Rabajà” zone, with south, south-westerly exposure

Altitude: 235 / 315 meters a.s.l.

Soil: Limestone and clay soil rich in minerals and stratified with layers of “tufo”

Age of vineyard around 50 years. Density of planting system guyot-4,000 vines per hectare

Vinification around 30 days of fermentation in stainless steel and old cement tanks

Ageing: 20/22 months in Slavonian oak barrels ranging in size of 17 to 25 hectolitres and in age of 5/6 years minimum. Minimum 10 months of maturing in the bottle before being released for sale.

“It’s impossible not to admire these genuine, sincere wines and their equally unpretentious prices”. Antonio Galloni

About Guiseppe Cortese

Giuseppe went solo in 1971, making his first wine under his own name.

About the 2017 Barbaresco Vintage

The message for 2017 is clear: Taste, Taste, Taste! The frost and hail that hit parts of the regions has impacted the quality of the wines from those parts. Where vineyards escaped these events delicious wines have resulted, take Olek Bondonio’s Roncagliette as just one example. They’ll be plenty of strong Barbaresco. We’ll just need to be careful to weed out the wines that didn’t make the cut.

From Galloni:

“Whereas 2016 was an extraordinarily benign year, pretty much anything that could happen did happen in 2017. A warm, dry winter led to early bud break. That, alone, would not have been a problem, but it left vines unusually vulnerable to a brutal hailstorm on April 15. The damages were especially severe in Neive, where a number of vineyards were practically wiped out. “Yields are down 60% for Barbera and 75-80% for Nebbiolo,” Claudia Cigliuti explained. As if that was not enough, Barbaresco was affected by the same late April frost that was an issue for other regions in Europe. Neive in particular was especially hard hit in the hillside that encompasses Basarin, Fausoni and Currà. “Hail wiped out 60% of the crop on the Basarin hillside, and frost took out the rest pretty much in the same spots,” Andrea Sottimano told me. “At that point, my dad and I decided the best thing to do was just prune the vines for the next year.” Whereas Dolcetto and Barbera can give some fruit from second generation buds, Nebbiolo is trickier because there is a risk the fruit won’t fully ripen, and the lower quality of that fruit is not worth the risk of compromising the next vintage. As readers will see in the producer commentaries, some growers did not bottle their Neive Barbarescos from the hardest hit sectors. Warm, dry weather resumed and carried through to harvest. Conditions in Piedmont often change around mid-August, when evening temperatures start to retreat, but that was not the case in 2017. Diurnal shifts during the last month of ripening are considered essential for the development of color, aromatics and full maturity of tannins, and that did not happen in 2017.”

Where in the World is Giuseppe Cortese?

Cortese’s best vineyard is undoubtedly his Rabajà

Contrary to how it may appear when seen from a distance, the Rabajà hill is anything but homogeneous and can be broadly divided into at least two areas. The first bordering on Asili coincides with the picturesque amphitheatre overlooking the Martinenga cru, and mostly enjoys a south-westerly aspect. The second, on the other hand, is more linear and faces due south, though within it there are some evident variations due to marked undulations around the hillside. In both cases, the style of the wine is, however, richer and bolder than the Asili and Martinenga (although a more uncompromising, mineral character tends to emerge in the second area).

Cortese’s Rabajà is mainly facing south-west in the hollow above Martinenga, south for the remainder