I have been buying Sandrone’s wines for years, and have tasted every vintage here back to 1982, but nothing in my experience could have prepared me for the 1990 Barolo Le Vigne. The wine is simply stunning from the very first taste, and only continues to improve in the glass. Sweet, perfumed and layered, the 1990 Le Vigne impresses for its opulence and plumpness, all of which are balanced with superb aromatics, great length and tons of freshness. Sweet spices and menthol add the final exclamation points in this profound, moving Barolo. Because of its early accessibility, I have always assigned earlier drinking windows for Le Vigne vis-a-vis the Cannubi Boschis, but this bottle made me question that view. In 1990 Le Vigne was in its first vintage. Sandrone made just 4,000 bottles and they were all snapped up by his US importer at the time, Marc de Grazia, meaning any remaining bottles are mostly likely in the US. The vineyards used in this multi-vineyard 1990 Barolo are Vignane and Rivassi, both in the village of Barolo. Readers who might still be hanging onto this wine should be thrilled! Anticipated maturity: 2010-2020.
Luciano Sandrone was still working full time at Marchesi di Barolo when he made his fabulous 1989 Barolo Cannubi Boschis. In the spring of 1990 Sandrone left the Marchesi in order to devote all of his energy to his own estate, and the rest, as they say, is history. Sandrone’s Barolos were built on elegance from the outset. Although Sandrone was clearly one of the early leaders of the modern school, his wines avoided the excesses of the mid and late 1990s. These meticulously hand-crafted, artisanal Barolos were vinified in steel and cement with manual pumpovers and punchdowns, then racked into 500-liter tonneaux where the wines underwent malolactic fermentation and subsequent aging. I can’t think of another property where the stylistic shift from somewhat traditional to decidedly contemporary is as noticeable within such a short period of time as it is here between 1989 and 1990. While the 1989 Cannubi Boschis (and the Barolos that preceded it) still had a foot in the past, the 1990 is clearly a forward-looking wine. Much of that is attributable to the ripeness of the 1990 vintage and the introduction of new French oak barrels from the cooper Vicard that year. I tasted the 1990 Barolo Le Vigne and Barolo Cannubi Boschis at the estate, and have had the 1989 and 1990 Barolo Cannubi Boschis from a number of cellars, including mine and that of Robert Parker, over the course of the last few months.
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