The 1998 Barolo Riserva La Rocca e La Pira is a perplexing wine. Here, too, the aromas aren’t perfectly clean, but unlike some of the other wines in this lineup, those notes appear on the palate as well. The wine offers excellent density and richness in its dark plums, cherries, leather and spices, but there are some impurities that are most likely the case of the wine having spent too much time in oak that are accentuated in a smaller vintage such as 1998. The Riserva La Rocca e La Pira is made from vines with an average age of 70 years. The wine saw 85 days of maceration in wood vats followed by eight years in oak. Anticipated maturity: 2008-2018. This is a fascinating set of wines from Roagna, a historic estate in Barbaresco that is once again gaining the visibility and recognition it deserves. Proprietor Luca Roagna is young, humble and incredibly passionate about preserving his family’s traditional approach to making wine. The estate works with old vines, which are trained to ripen late. In the cellar, macerations are very long and aging takes place primarily in French oak casks. Roagna is one of Italy’s most promising young producers and his future looks to be very bright. This year, as last, I found some of the wines not fully perfect in their aromatics, with notes of woodiness that suggest the wines may be spending too much time in barrel. According to Luca Roagna, these aromas and flavors can be attributed to the new barrels the estate began using around 2000. Still, my sense is that the wines could achieve an entirely different level of quality if a few years of the barrel aging were replaced with time in bottle.Importer: Louis Dressner Selections, New York, NY; tel. (212) 334-8191

Here is a carefully aged Barolo Riserva from the Pira cru (also known as La Rocca) with dark concentration backed by rose petal, hickory smoke, root beer, wet stone and moist mineral notes. It’s a big, bold and masculine interpretation with an elegant, dusty mouthfeel and polished tannins. Drink now with pork stuffed with wild mushrooms.——M.L.(4/1/2009)—— 90