The night of my bon voyage party at Jaynes Gastropub in San Diego last month, Jayne and Jon gave me a bottle of birth-year Barolo to send me off in style: a 1967 Barolo by Borgogno. After driving my 1989 Volvo across country to Austin in mid-December, I let the bottle rest until the other night when Tracie B and I opened it for dinner. After we tasted and thoroughly enjoyed the wine and the experience, I turned to a tome that some (myself included) consider to be one of the most important works on Barolo and its history: Il Barolo come lo sento io, by Massimo Martinelli (Asti: Sagittario. 1993). The book was recommended to me many years ago by a restaurateur in Alba and it took me a long time to track it down. I simply can’t express its value in terms of understanding Barolo and its evolution: the vintage notes and analyses (stretching back to 1868!), the colorful anecdotes and vignettes of Barolo’s great personages, and Martinelli’s often poetic accounts of Barolo and its vicissitudes make it an indispensable tool in understanding the greatness of this wine. The title alone reveals the breadth (and passion) of Martinelli’s writing: Barolo, as I know (feel and taste it).* (I wish I had the time and resources to translate the whole book but, alas, with the state of publishing as it is and the narrow field of interest, this labor amoris will have to wait.)

Above: Please try this at home! Drink old wine with food! Don’t fetishize it. Respect it but don’t be intimidated by it. The people who made it intended it to be served with food. We served the 1967 Borgogno with pork loin chops, seasoned and dredged in flour, seared and deglazed with white wine. You don’t have to drink old Barolo with a fondue of Fontina and poached eggs topped with shaved white truffles (although that’s not a bad pairing either).

Martinelli ranks vintages as follows (for sake of clarity, my translation is slavish): exceptional, great, optimal, good, normal, mediocre, bad. His top vintages are 1947, 1971, and 1985 (some might be surprised by his assessment of certain vintages). Here’s what he has to say about 1967: “Majestic. Optimal vintage. Full, robust wine, with intense aromas” (again, a slavish translation). His drinkability prediction: “Wine with its full character: more than twenty years (1987…). Wine with its character still evident: more than ten years (1997…).”

Above: According to the newly revamped Borgogno website, the winery was founded in 1761. But 1848 is the date that accompanies the inscription on the label, “labore cum honore pro patria” or “made with honor for the nation.” I imagine the date refers to the year of the first war of Italian independence and is an indicator of Barolo’s historic significance in the birth of an “Italian wine nation,” as I have called it.

When I lived and worked in New York, I had the opportunity to taste a number of Borgogno “library” releases. According the label of this bottling, it was tasted, decanted, and rebottled in 2007, and had been topped off with wine from the same vintage. I’m not certain but my impression is that other library releases by Borgogno were topped off with young wine (a common practice for library releases, and not something that I oppose). The 1967 did not seem to have been topped off with young wine and despite its age, it was alive with perceptible acidity and eucalyptus and tarry notes, typical of old Nebbiolo.

Thanks Jayne and Jon! We thoroughly enjoyed this wine — nearly as old as me (since I was born during the Summer of Love while this wine was still in the vineyard)!

Post scriptum: In 2008, Borgogno was purchased by Italian food magnate Oscar Farinetti, who vowed to maintain the winery’s traditional style and not make it modern, even though he hired the duke of modernity, Giorgio Rivetti (the winemaker behind the rhinoceros), as a marketing consultant. In a recent post, Franco noted, however, that not much has changed at Borgogno, except for a “dusted off” website.

* In Italian, the verb sentire, from the Latin sentio sentire (to discern by sense, feel, hear, see, perceive, be sensible of) means to feel, to hear, to taste, to sense, to perceive (depending on the context). It’s akin to the English sentient.