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The Recent Releases of Aldo Conterno

A Note from Sergio            

The hills around Barolo look like God reached down and put his fingers in a lush green pie. The land undulates with the whorls of an extreme close-up of a fingerprint. Every slope is lined like ruled paper with rows and rows of vines, each plot showing mathematical precision, fitting together like pieces of a laser-cut jigsaw puzzle. There's a dizzying sense in Barolo--on your approach, it doesn't look as if it's so high, so round, or so confusing--but atop every hillside there's this tumbling sense of rolling down and falling into a great, green goddess's lap.

It's easy to lose your sense of direction, to tell one great slope from another, to point accurately to Romirasco, to Bussia, to Cicala. Driving around Barolo, I'm always struck with the same thought: If there was ever a landscape that looks like it should make great wines, Barolo is it. If only in this one case, looks are not deceiving. Some of the world's greatest wines come from Barolo, and many of the world's greatest winemakers have gravitated there, pulled by the sheer force of its terroir, its challenges, its rewards, and its beauty.

It's easy to talk about a vineyard's terroir, what the soil is made of and how the tectonic plates shifted to offer up fresh earth in one vineyard and old earth in another. It's easy to talk about how those fresh soils grow grapes that make elegant, feminine wines, while those older soils grow grapes that make austere, brooding wines. It's easy to measure a ten-degree temperature difference from the bottom of a slope to the top, and to show a correlation between the opulence of the wines at the bottom and the finesse of the wines at the top. But you don't really get it, Barolo's magic of nature, of fate, of impenetrable history and of human ingenuity, until you visit, and the more you visit, the more it just floors you. Barolo is beautiful beyond words. So too are its wines, when crafted by the hands of a master.

This week, I'm delighted to offer the new releases of Aldo Conterno, a winemaker who has spent his whole life in Barolo and knows it intimately. Aldo is one of those winemakers who defies easy categorization--he's neither strictly traditional, nor is he modernist--and whose wines are so good that easy definitions cease to matter. He makes wines because he loves to make them; the land, the weather and the terroir dictate his practices, ultimately, and even if Barolo looks like a place that should make great wines, Aldo year in and year out proves that it does. In fact, it makes celestial wines.

My Best,