Diego Conterno - Monforte d'Alba 2019
Our Italian red wine journey continues: we're drinking a bottle of Barolo del Comune di Monforte d'Alba 2019 from Diego Conterno.
Unlike Chianti, Barolo, or at least wine made from Nebbiolo, actually does show up here more often. Not often, but more often. And that’s not because I think I know my way around Piedmont much better than Tuscany and can therefore make more informed buying decisions. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s simply because the amount of Barolo that falls into a price range I’m willing to pay is so small that whenever one turns up at a merchant whose selection I trust, I read the description and often add a bottle to my order. Just so we’re clear: the message here is definitely not that you should simply make everything so expensive that people like your colleague Saufwein end up buying more entry-level wine. That is not a sustainable business model! Doubly not, because the entry level would be the estate Nebbiolo or the Dolcetto.
Today, though, we’re drinking Barolo, namely from Diego Conterno. The first name matters, because there are a lot of Conternos in Piedmont. The best known is surely Giacomo Conterno (far beyond the budget), but Diego Conterno does his part as well. He co-founded Conterno Fantino in 1982, stayed on board there for 20 years, and then founded his own estate with his family in 2003. In the meantime, the next generation has joined in the person of Stefano. Eight hectares are farmed organically. The vines for today’s wine grow in three sites around Monforte d’Alba. I couldn’t find anything on the 2019 vintage, the 2022 was fermented in stainless steel, aged for almost two years in wooden casks and rested in a concrete egg before bottling. I assume 2019 was treated pretty similarly.
The wine has a delicate red fruit that grows more and more intense the longer you breathe in, yet never loses its delicacy. There’s cherry, there are berries, mint and menthol, some fresh wood and old leather sofa. The more often you breathe in, the more dried fruit joins in, without pushing the fruit aside, though. And something else that’s on the tip of my tongue, but only there. My drinking companion says ink, and I think that hits it pretty well. I’m left-handed, which is why I hate fountain pens from the bottom of my heart. At least the ink I had to write with at school. Every damn word smudged. Other left-handers developed funny claw grips to avoid that, my fine motor skills didn’t play along. Three cheers for ballpoint pens, but I digress. It’s good that so much is happening on the nose, that you can breathe in so long and so often to discover new things. That gives the tongue time to digest the tannin. 2019 is simply no age for a Barolo like this, and this one wraps your tongue thickly in cotton wool. But I like the tannin. It’s fine-grained, intense, has a bit of cassis about it. But no matter how much I like it, it’s not suited to big gulps today. A wine for a long evening, then. With the wine in your mouth, the nose becomes even more intensely fruity, more cherry-like. The intensity of Amarena cherries, but without marzipan and without sugar.
For organisational reasons, we skip the second evening and only take the bottle out of the fridge again on day three. It’s more open now, more roasty. A fascinating aroma of cherries, Zwetschgenröster (stewed plums), vanilla and, all in all, a bit of Christmas. Wood, leather and dark aromatics are there. The tannin hasn’t gone away, of course, that would be absurd, but the acidity has fought its way into a respectable second place and can now hold its own. With some sips, you get the feeling it’s catching up with the tannin. This is a fireside wine, a winter wine, which now shows above all spice on the palate. It’s the kind of wine you mentally place in the reading room, in the leather wingback chair. Not that I had a reading room. Or a wingback chair. But you know what I mean. With air, the freshness returns, the mint, the cherries, which turn more towards sour cherry again. I like that a lot. But let’s not kid ourselves either: if you don’t celebrate tannin, you’re in the wrong place here. I simply lack the experience to say how long you’d have to wait for it to melt away, and how much of the great fruit would still be left then. I haven’t yet drunk really old Barolo, and even then you’d at least have to put the same vintage, young, next to it, or pull out of a hat your own note on the same wine when it was young. Realistically, that will never happen to me in large enough quantities for me to ever stick my neck out here regarding ageing behaviour. And that’s okay. Because I don’t think you have to wait. Sure, you can, and you’ll certainly be rewarded. But you can also set aside two, three, four evenings and drink your way into the tannin in small sips. Because then you’ll have a great time with this wine today, too.