1999 Barolo Riserva Bussia Vigna Fiuri

The 1999 Barolo Bussia Riserva Vigna Fiurin is rich, round and sweet, with a surprisingly soft and seamless personality for a vintage that yielded so many powerful Barolos. Bright red fruit leads to spices, flowers and beautifully-integrated French oak. A long, fresh finish suggests the wine has at least another decade of fine drinking ahead of it. The 1999 Barolo Bussia Riserva Vigna Fiurin is the second Riserva Parusso has presented from the 1999 vintage (the first was the Rocche, released last year). Anticipated maturity: 2010-2024. I was deeply impressed with the wines I tasted from Marco Parusso this year. Parusso gambled and left the fruit hanging until late October, when he brought in the last of the Nebbiolo crop. The 2006 Barolos were vinified first in steel, then racked into French oak, where the alcoholic and malolactic fermentations were completed. The wines spent 24 months on their lees prior to being bottled. Marco Parusso is one of Piedmont’s most relentless explorers, and every new vintage seems to bring with it a twist. Parusso is among the few producers increasing the amount of new French oak in his Barolos and has begun experimenting with the partial use of stems in vinification, an approach no one else to my knowledge in using in Piedmont. Importer: Montecastelli Selections, New York, NY; tel. (212) 414-4898

An improvement begins to be felt with the 1999 Barolo Bussia Vigna Fiurin, spicy on the nose and with ripe fruit, complex with its notes of tar and licorice, but the palate needs more flesh and roundness. Anticipated maturity: 2005-2016. Various American importers, including Michael Skurnik, Syosset, NY; tel. (516) 677-9300

Good full red. Tangy raspberry, cherry and spices on the nose, with notes of sweet oak and musky coffee. Sweet, silky and expansive, with perfectly integrated acidity and some spicy oak showing. Finishes very long, with fine, thoroughly buffered tannins. Seems more successful than the '98 version of this wine.