Vietti Barolo Cerequio 2019
£185.25
The wine
Cerequio is one of the most celebrated slopes in La Morra, and Vietti farm a prized parcel of it. An elegant and superbly balanced Barolo Cru showing both finesse and structure, with strawberry, plum, cherry and rose petal aromas through to a full, complex and harmonious palate with a balsamic note on the finish.
Cerequio lies immediately alongside Brunate on the same south-facing ridge, and the two have been mentioned in the same breath for two centuries. The amphitheatre shape of the site holds warmth, so it ripens reliably even in cooler years, and the Tortonian marl beneath gives the perfume and the silk rather than the grip. Of the Vietti crus this is often the most immediately charming, without giving up the structure to age.
The producer
Vietti
View all Vietti winesVietti is one of the defining names of Piedmont, based in the village of Castiglione Falletto at the heart of Barolo. The family have grown grapes here since the nineteenth century, but the estate as we know it was shaped by Alfredo Currado, who married Luciana Vietti in 1957 and spent the next four decades changing what Piedmont thought possible.
Two things made his name. In 1961 he bottled Barolo from the Rocche di Castiglione vineyard on its own, one of the first single-cru Barolos ever released, at a time when almost everything was blended across the commune. The idea that individual sites deserved their own bottling is now orthodoxy; then it was heresy. He also rescued Arneis, the white grape of the Roero, which had fallen to a handful of rows and was days from disappearing altogether.
The range here runs from Roero Arneis and Timorasso through Barbera and Langhe Nebbiolo to seven Barolo crus and a Barbaresco, each farmed and vinified separately. Vietti labels have carried commissioned artwork since 1974, which is why no two look quite alike.
