The 2007 Dolcetto d’Alba offers an explosion of dark red fruit, flowers, licorice and tar with lovely inner perfume and gorgeous balance. With air this medium-bodied wine puts on weight as balsamic notes emerge, adding further complexity. Roagna’s Dolcetto saw an incredible 30 days of maceration on the skins followed by a full year in oak, an unusual regime in Piedmont these days to say the least, but one which gives this wine notable complexity for Dolcetto. Anticipated maturity: 2008-2011. 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