Tasting Notes
JancisRobinson.com 18
Barbaresco. From the Roncagliette cru. Just mid ruby and a shade deeper than the straight Barbaresco. Very deep and concentrated and complex on the nose. Cherry and raspberry with a savoury edge. The palate is packed with red fruit and bags of fine sandy tannins, but it is all still embryonic. Elegant and poised yet firmly structured. Beautifully balanced. A wine like a sculpture. (WS)
Anticipated maturity: 2024-2038
Robert Parker 96
The 2016 Barbaresco Costa Russi is a very botanical wine in terms of its aromas, with lovely perfumes of rose, elderflower, sambuco and anise seed, along with a touch of glycerine. It then follows up with some sweetness that feels very embracing in this wine. This is the more ephemeral, delicate and floral member of the extended Barbaresco family from Gaja, with a crunchy tannic bite, but nothing too severe. There is a really good vitality and energy to this very expressive wine. Costa Russi remains the smallest of Gaja’s single-vineyard wines, and Gaia Gaja warns that there will be considerably less of it starting with the 2017 vintage. Production for this wine had always varied greatly to begin with, due in part to the fragile nature of the 80-year-old vines, but about half of those were removed and replanted. It will be a while before the new vines are old enough to go online. So, with some 10,000 bottles made in 2016 and 6,000 bottles in 2015, we can count on those numbers to be split by half over the next three to four years, for sure.
Anticipated maturity: 2023-2045
