2014 Barbaresco Rabaja

The Bruno Rocca 2014 Barbaresco Riserva Rabajà is a subtle and soft expression that brings us a very elegant and ethereal side of Nebbiolo. This wine is part of the Rocca family's relatively new Riserva program, and it's so exciting to be able to taste this controversial vintage now, with some distance. The bouquet opens quietly and without much fanfare to reveal a slow succession of dried berries, smoke, camphor ash and crushed stone. These qualities all grow with time as the wine takes on air in the glass. Those pretty mineral accents are its most distinctive quality. A mere 1,880 bottles were made in addition to larger formats.

The 2014 Barbaresco Riserva Rabajà is dark, dense and powerful, with muscular tannins, all of which give the wine its distinctive brooding feel. There is real depth and substance in the glass. Some of the new oak influence (from a new cask in 2014) needs to integrate, but there is plenty of potential here. Sweet red cherry, hard candy, wild flowers and mint are some of the many notes that develop in the glass.

This is a delightful cool-vintage Nebbiolo that promises a long aging future ahead. In fact, I bet this wine will prove more interesting as it evolves, compared to a warmer vintage such as 2015 (which I tasted beside this wine). The 2014 Barbaresco Rabajà is tightly bound and firm at its center. It shows fragrant tones of wild rose, cassis, crushed mineral and balsam herb at the edges. These delicate nuances should develop and take on more power as the wine moves though time. This vintage ends with a vein of fresh acidity that adds to the focused and tight youthfulness of the wine today.