What's Pressoir Drinking?

November 16, 2020
By Raj Vaidya

Last weekend I had the opportunity to celebrate a friend’s birthday, Last year for his 40th I was mostly absent on account of being busy with work and La Fête du Champagne 2019, so I was excited to share a special birth year bottle with him which I had been saving for the occasion. 41 is more worthy of a celebration anyway, I figured!

The wines from Bartolo Mascarello, especially from this era, are truly classic expressions of reductively vinified Nebbiolo. The wines undergo fermentation in large Botti or upright wood casks, always old wood, never affecting the wines with oak flavors. The aging is slow and undisturbed for the most part, the lees (or sediment of yeasts from fermentation) remain in the wood tanks the entire time and the wine is never racked or removed from the sediment. This produces some reductive aromas and flavors, which when the wine is mature can express themselves in some ways easily confused as oxidation when in fact the opposite is the case. Such was the effect on this bottle.

It started out with notes of tar, balsamic and tree sap, but underneath that there was a distinct minerality, which promised the wine would evolve in the decanter. An hour later, aromas of celery salt, mushrooms and pine resin came to the forefront. Finally, the floral notes shined through and all those madeira or cooked and oxidative notes fell away. Dried rose petal, jasmine, incense and cranberries, with such a mineral elegance that the wine (despite a fair bit of tannin) felt completely weightless on the palate. Old Barolo is as close to Musigny as one can get outside of Burgundy, I’ve always held. This bottle proved my theory perfectly.