Red cherries, sweet spices and herbs greet your nose and palate, with a solid backbone of noble tannins and balanced acidity that extend the layered aromas and flavours on the very suave and very long back end. Giacomo Conterno 2014 Barolo Riserva “Monfortino” 97Īnother majestic Monfortino in the making, the product of a difficult vintage but then Monfortino has a track record for excellence in tough vintages (remember the gorgeous 2002). Like all the previous times before this one, tasting these wines in the company of she and those who make them is a memory I will cherish. Speaking of Bruna, I have known her for something like fifteen-twenty years, have tasted with her regularly at the winery during that time frame, and did so again this year, when practically nobody else did because of Covid. It is also a wine that would make Bruno Giacosa proud, so good for Bruna Giacosa, his daughter. This is an absolutely superb wine that induces silence in the room: by that I mean that anyone lucky enough to taste it will remain inevitably awestruck in admiration and speechless. Most impressive is the silky-smooth texture that is quite unlike any other Barbaresco or Barolo wine you will taste this year. Explosively perfumed, multifaceted and extremely complex, with a red cherry and sweet spice personality of uncommon depth and complexity. The following wines were tasted during the course of 2020 either directly at the wineries or in my office in Rome when I used to live there.īruno Giacosa 2016 Barbaresco Riserva Asili 100īright red with a pale rim. Clearly, there were certainly many other very fine wines made in Italy in 2020, but in an effort to come up with a serviceable, easy to read list, I have limited the wines on this “Best of” list to those I scored 96 /100 or above, but again, I want to stress that there were many, many other truly exciting wines top-drawer released in Italy last year. And unlike other countries that are best known mostly for one or two specific wines, with Italy it is hard to focus on just one grape or one wine type or one region, because that means missing out on some real beauties.Īfter a year of tasting through at times a truly compelling set of wines, ranging from surprising discoveries to mainstream products to rare small-volume efforts, I compiled the following list of top Italian wines of 2020 based on their quality, value, score, and availability. Narrowing a list down to only 20 “best wines of the year”, those that you should not miss out on, is really no easy feat. So enjoyable in fact that I had gotten to forty wines before I even realized I was wayyyyy over my self-imposed wine number limit!įact is, Italy offers not just an amazing diversity of wine grapes, but of habitats too, and so the potential to make fine wines is almost endless. And Italy certainly contributed its share of very fine wines indeed, such that setting out to choose the top 20 wines of 2020 looked to be a highly enjoyable task. Clearly, the smiling was limited to when the mind stopped focusing on the Covid-associated disaster at hand and concentrated instead on the many wonderful wines released in 2020 all over the world. Even in a year as a difficult as 2020 turned out to be for the world of wine (not that 2021 has been a walk in the park, at least, not this far) there were reasons to smile.
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