March 28, 2024 - Onto this years Easter wines🥳🥳🥳😍😍😍
This would have been clearly a 💯 pointer bottle, if the prior wine was such a clear step ahead, so this might remain the forever 99+ wine for me🤣
My prior detailed tasting notes are spot on just the tannins are finally after 23 years fully melting!
The wine has plenty of life ahead, would say now until 2035.
99+
January 6, 2024 - Still a lovely barolo, but not at the intense level in 2017.
December 25, 2023 - Beautiful wine
November 20, 2023 - no decant; 18c; bottle opened for a couple of hours; clean, coppered color; subtle nose of tobacco, raspberries; intense initial attack, rasping tannins over solid red fruit, giving minute-long, gripping finish (tannins softened nicely with some more hours); schist, iron water, raspberries, cherries, tobacco; a huge wine after so many years in the cellar, could hang in for another decade; 18.5
August 27, 2023 - It feels great when a wine delivers on a special evening with friends after patiently aging in your cellar for 15+ years. This is a fine aged Barolo of high caliber. Others provided good descriptors, so I'll just suggest that it's peaking now, relative to my other two bottles consumed in years past. A one hour decant proved sufficient.
January 7, 2023 - This wine is excellent. I approached a bit skeptically given WS original 99 pt score but this truly delivered (albeit not 99). The color is two shades darker than I expected for a 21 year old Barolo, perhaps belying some of the flavorful intensity. A bit of bricking at the rim. Opening nose was on the earthy side: licorice, forest floor, charcoal, tar. Nice grippy tannins holding it all together. What merited the high score was the evolution of the wine. We drank undecanted for about four hours and it kept evolving to become increasingly complex and interesting. After a couple of hours, the earthy nose turned into baking spices and darker fruits, all the while holding on to it's tannic structure - not something you see too often. I toggled back and forth between a 94 and 95, ultimately deciding on the latter because the last sip was the best - what you want from an elite bottle of wine. For Barolo fans of any stripe, this will not disappoint.
November 24, 2022 - Pretty brick color. Nose and palate were open upon uncork and 1st pour. Definitely new world style. Fruit forward, but still very dry, tannic and woody. The wood was nicely integrated, but there was quite a bit of it. Seems nicely aged at this point; not sure how this would continue to evolve.
October 16, 2022 - The '01 Ginestra is a very enjoyable, albeit clearly very modern, Barolo. While it remains tannic and muscular, the flavor profile suggests to me that the wine is drinking at around peak.
The nose is nicely perfumed with dark red plum fruit, licorice, sweet spices, tobacco, and a touch of mint. On the palate, the wine is medium in body with medium to high tannin, with tannin exploding in the mouth and still very drying on the midpalate to the finish, a bit grainy in texture. I found a similar dark red, plum / cherry fruit profile along with licorice and sweet spices.
This wine seems fairly similar to the old Azelia or Scavino wines I've tasted, in that while the flavor profile retains a bit of the 'modern' profile (the kind of spice I found in this wine reminds me of other Barolo aged in new oak), the biggest tell that it's a more modern wine seems to be this aggressive, hard to integrate tannin (from the wood?) that all these wines seem to have.
August 30, 2022 - Spectacular Italian tasting dinner. 2000 Scavino Bric del Fiasc. 2000 Scavino Carobric. 2001 Soldera BdM Riserva. 2001 Conterno Fantino Sori Ginestra. 1996 G. Mascarello Monprivato. All wines decanted for 1-2 hours. Dinner: pate, seared tuna, NY strip steak, cheese platter.
The Conterno Fantino Sori Ginestra was outstanding. The wine is fully mature, and closer to the end than the beginning of its prime. By contrast with the Scavino wines, this wine seemed more "old school", with the fruit less forward and the structure more pronounced. While it is a powerful wine, the detail is amazing and the finish very long.
I thought this was very close to the WOTN, and the competition was ferocious. The Soldera was the unanimous favorite of our dinner party of 4, and I don't disagree but I rated the Conterno Fantino second.
May 21, 2022 - il gran finale del Barolo di compleanno (Osteria Langhe, Chicago IL): This likely does suffer from being right after a flight of killer traditional Barolos. At the same time it's a stark contrast and not necessarily in a good way. The oak hasn't really come close to integrating and it forms a very noticeable backdrop with richer tones of black currants, black cherries, black raspberries, licorice, wood spices, tobacco leaf, some pencil lead, violets, and some creamy vanilla tones. The Full bodied feel has some rough edges with tart, medium+ acidity with woody and stiffer, high tannins. I would like to try this again and maybe in a more solo setting. This bottle is extremely modern, but it also lacks some charm and the oak overpowers too much. I'm not sure this will improve much from here.