All wines
Boris
Ca' del Baio
Pora
2016
4.5
Region
Italy › Piedmont › Barbaresco DOCG
Type
red · still
Grapes
Nebbiolo
Alcohol
15%
Volume
750 mL
Tasting Notes(1)
4.5
Blood sausage and pine needles open the nose, with raspberry, menthol, and damp earth threading through, plus a flicker of black berries underneath - closed but unmistakably grand-cru in pedigree. Super fresh and pointy on the palate, the tannin aggressive and powerful, but the wine is so concentrated, so complex, so properly multilayered that the structure reads as a feature rather than a wall. Needs food to land cleanly, but I'd happily make that work. The blind guess was a grand cru - the answer being Barbaresco Pora lines up: 1948 vines in third-fill barriques giving the cuvée this kind of seriousness.
About
Pora is one of the historic Barbaresco crus, a south-west-facing hillside on bluish clay-limestone marl with sandy veins that drops steeply toward the Tanaro river. Soils here are a touch more fertile than at higher-elevation sites, and the cru is generally read as giving smoother tannins and an earthier register that opens earlier than the neighbouring Asili. Ca' del Baio's parcel was planted in 1948, making the vines among the oldest in their lineup; destemmed fruit ferments on the skins in temperature-controlled steel with maceration running 7 to 15 days, after which the wine spends 24 months in third-fill barriques followed by around 10 months in bottle before release. The 2016 vintage in Barbaresco delivered the same near-ideal balance of structure and freshness celebrated across Piedmont that year, which suits Pora's already-supple frame and gives this bottling a long drinking window without sacrificing early approachability.
