Vietti Barbaresco ‘Rabajà Riserva’ 2019

Why is this Wine so Yummy?

Grapes: 100% Nebbiolo

Winemaking: The grapes are harvested from vineyard located Treiso. The vineyard has a southern exposure with a mix of clay and limestone in the soil. During the alcoholic fermentation, the must will remain for approximately 3 weeks in open-top stainless-steel tanks. Daily délestages, punching downs and open-air pumping overs are actioned daily. The malolactic is done in barriques.

Aging: Big oak vats, barriques and steel tanks for a total of 2 and half years.

Description: garnet ruby colour, slight garnet hue, with intense aromas of ripe cherries with intricate complexities of minerals, tea leaves and rose petals. With firm, ripe tannins, crisp acidity and feminine and round structure, this Barbaresco shows incredible finesse with excellent balance, integration and a long, lingering finish.

The Prologue

Luca & Elena passed the baton to their longstanding vineyard and winery crew and have started a new chapter with Cascina Penna-Currado. Whilst at Vietti they stayed true to their convictions, and, history, acknowledging the wisdom of their family, and elder peers. While their Cru Barolos have brought them international fame, they have worked to protect patches of history for both their family and the region. Listen to Luca share his stories of retaining the Scarrone vineyard planted to Barbera when his father had planned to replant it to Nebbiolo, saving Arneis from being reconciled to a note in a wine book, and, more recently going back to Barbaresco, acquiring a parcel or Rabajà, and this becomes clear.

The drive for constant improvement continues with a parcel of Monvigliero now in the stables, whole bunch techniques are being applied with the help of Jeremy Seysses from Dujac. Meanwhile, Vietti started making Timorasso in 2018. Grapes for this white coming from vineyards located in Monleale in the Alessandria Province.

I tasted a wide range of wines on my most recent visit to Vietti. Starting with the 2020 Barolos, I tasted every wine from a just-opened bottle and a bottle that had been double-decanted two hours prior to my arrival. Aeration can be a tricky thing with young, just-bottled wines. Sometimes, air can help young wines open but also shut them down hard. In 2020, the double-decanted bottles showed better.

In 2020, virtually all the fruit for the single-vineyard Barolos was picked in late September, before the early October rains. Harvest resumed on October 5 with the second portion of Lazzarito and various parcels used in the Barolo Castiglione. The 2020s spent about 24 days on the skins, with submerged cap maceration for most lots. Time in cask was 24-26 months.

Readers will note several new wines in the range. Vietti’s 2019 Barbaresco Riserva Rabajà is stellar. The same is true, incidentally, of the 2020 Barbaresco Roncaglie. I have long admired the Barbarescos here. That is once again the case this year. The 2016 Barolo Riserva is the next incarnation of the 2015 Barolo Riserva that was released last year, but it was made from different vineyards and vinified with a high percentage of whole clusters.

Antonio Galloni, Vinous

A Little About Vietti

Back in 2005, I spent some time at Vietti. Their winery sits in the castle atop Castiglione Falletto. It’s walls broken by slit windows for archers to defend the grounds. The escape tunnel leading from the castle to the plains below had been filled in only a few years prior to my visit. Somehow they’ve managed to modernise aspects of the winery carving into the rock without collapsing the ancient buildings surrounding it.

One of my earlier experience of Vietti was at the Australian Wine Research Institutes Advanced Wine Assessment Course. A blind bracket of 9 Nebbiolo’s was presented, Vietti’s Perbacco from 1998 and Brunate from 1996. The Brunate was superb. My notes from the tasting read “Very complex, great harmony, texture, rich, long, very together, perfumed, incredible layers and vibrancy.” The Perbacco excellent, particularly at 1/8th the price. “Great purity, balance, and poise. Supple with an excellent core of fruit and lovely floral notes.”

In many ways, little has changed. Perbacco, typically declassified Barolo, is the wine to crack while you’re waiting for your Barolo to mature!

Vietti intrigues me. Some of the best Barolo I have devoured have come from their winery. Watching the wines evolve over time, both the same vintage and across vintages has been fascinating. Modern technology at times pierced the tradition. Last year a vertical tasting going back to 1982 was fascinating. It again highlighted my growing consensus that the drinking window for good Barolo, from great years, starts at around 10 years and is right in the zone between 15 and 20 years.

Whilst Vietti have always produced more structured wines, the wines have always shown harmony and balance. The difficult 2011 year was perhaps a sign of a maturity and wisdom in the winemaking. They guided the fruit to a state of great harmony and balance in that year, pulling back on the structural elements to produce wines that were drinking superbly in late 2016.

In the last couple of years, I have devoured many more Vietti wines including a 1996 Villero Riserva and 1997 Rocche di Castiglione. Both would be in the top dozen Barolos I’ve every been lucky enough to devour!

A couple of podcasts with the Vietti Crew

Where in the World is Vietti?

The Krause Family bought Vietti a couple of years back, leaving, Luca and the Family in full control of production, hence the name below. The winery based in Castiglione Falletto now has additional vineyard sources in Barolo with Monvigliero in Verduno in the very North of the Barolo region, Rabajà & Roncaglie in the Barbaresco, and, Timorasso plantings in the Colli Tortonesi, the most eastern part of Piedmont. In addition, they have plantings in the Roero and Asti (the Barbera d’Asti Tre Vigne is a cracker).

The 2019 Vintage

“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.

Vintage reports from others to explore

Alessandro Masneghetti’s 2019 Barolo Vintage Report.