Community Tasting Notes 4

• SpenceP wrote: 94 points

  March 18, 2024 - Not on the level of the miraculous bottle of 4/17/23, but still quite lovely. Black plums, pomegranates, rose petals, fruitcake, cherries, tobacco, and cedar, with an astonishingly long and intense aftertaste, ending on a pleasantly bitter note. [Tasted over 3 hours from the Conterno glass. Best in the first half hour or so after opening--I would personally avoid decanting this wine.]

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• SpenceP wrote: 95 points

  April 17, 2023 - Incredibly gorgeous from the moment the bottle is opened. Rose petals, fruitcake, nutmeg, cinnamon, pomegranates, tobacco, sour cherries, cedar, and a stunningly long long long aftertaste with some not unpleasant bitterness. Just a spectacular wine. After something like 40 minutes in the glass it starts to gain in richness, but loses a lot of its glorious complexity--I personally would not even consider decanting this wine. [I gave this bottle two weeks upright to allow the sediment to settle, and the cork in this bottle was in remarkably good condition. Tasted over an hour and a half from the Conterno glass.]

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• SpenceP wrote: flawed

  March 15, 2020 - A second bottle from the same case as the one tasted on 11/15/2019 had a subtly tainted cork. I might not have noticed and simply blamed the wine, had I not tasted the earlier bottle--but having tasted that one, the taint was unmistakable. If you come across a bottle of this and can't understand why I described it the way that I did in my earlier note, you've probably found another of the tainted cork bottles, alas.

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• SpenceP wrote: 94 points

  November 15, 2019 - This was beautiful--much more so than the numerical score suggests. This was a wine that kept changing in the glass over the course of a 3 hour dinner, but in very quiet ways--the same basic aromas and flavors were always there, but first one would come to the front and then another--pomegranates, cherries, spices, fennel, citrus, fruitcake--each stepping forward to take a bow and then stepping aside for the next. Still at what must be its peak, but likely to decline soon--not even a hint of tannin. If you have any of this, I'd strongly suggest drinking it in the next year or at most two. As an objective score, 94 points feels right, but subjectively, I found this a magical wine.

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Wine Definition

• Vintage 1990
• Type Red
• Producer G.D. Vajra
• Varietal Barbera
• Designation Riserva
• Vineyard Bricco delle Viole
• Country Italy
• Region Piedmont
• SubRegion Alba
• Appellation Barbera d'Alba

Community Holdings

• Pending Delivery 0 (0%)
• In Cellars 13 (68%)
• Consumed 6 (32%)

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