Alcohol: 14%
Grape(s): 100% Nebbiolo
Localization: Barbaresco, Piedmont, Italy
Tasting Notes: A lively and fragrant sensation with a beautiful expression of fruit coming from this cru. The nose shows a range of beautiful sensations from violets, plums, savory, herbal notes, wild roses, black pepper, and black cherry. Balanced and fruity, with notes of orange and blackberry. The palate is creamy and complex. Sweet, full, integrated tannins, clean and expressive. The wines are characterized by precise and complex fruit expressions and clean, elegant aromas.
99 points James Suckling: Such wonderful clarity and perfume to this with strawberry and candied citrus, yet it’s always so subtle and vivid. Full-bodied and very powerful with lots of well-integrated tannins. Makes you stand to attention and notice it.
The Domain: Gaia Gaja began working at her father’s winery in October 2004, and was joined later by her sister Rosanna in 2009, and recently by her brother Giovanni in 2018. She recalls that at the start, her role was with the commercial aspect, as her father gave her the task of going around with the wines and traveling. “I remember the first trip in 2004, I accompanied him for a few months. My first responsibility was taking care of the importer, the commercial aspect and the promotion of the wines.”
She learned soon enough that by tasting the wines, she would come up with ideas that would benefit her in the future. “You see something you like; you see something you don’t like; you understand the strengths, you communicate with the winemaker. The way we communicate is by writing down big pieces, so I write down all my impressions. So this way, little by little, I started to get into vinification as well.”
Today, she does most of the traveling for her family, as her father recently turned 83. I asked her, when she first started traveling and promoting the Gaja wines, did she realize how great these wines truly were? “It’s a very good question, because maybe there were other people that made me notice that. For example, I was very surprised when people were telling me, ‘I can always recognize your wine. There is an imprint I can always recognize.’ I never thought about that.”
Gaja Barbaresco is an icon, as well as being a marque that even non-wine industry people recognize as something exceptional, as with Dom Perignon or Château Lafite-Rothschild. “The wines have an elegance and harmony,” she remarked, “even though our wines have never been the most fleeting and transparent. It’s an elegance that has tension with tannins, along with precise, pure fruit that stays for a long time. I think that fullness represents a style you can recognize in our wine.”
While Barbaresco has always been the signature wine for Gaja, Angelo decided to expand into Tuscany when he bought the Pieve Santa Restituta estate in Montalcino in 1994; this was followed in 1996 by the addition of the Ca’Marcanda estate in Bolgheri, near the Tyrrhenian Sea. That first wine from Pieve Santa Restituta in 1994 was called Sugarille, from a single vineyard, which soon followed by Rennina, a blend of three adjacent vineyards. In 2005, the family purchased additional land in a different part of Montalcino and began to produce a classic Brunello di Montalcino. Today these three wines make up the estate production; there is no Rosso di Montalcino.
