Barbaresco’s 2023 and 2022 vintages are polar opposites in wine style and taste, and yet the two years had fairly similar growing seasons. In a nutshell, the 2023 vintage will be remembered as one of many delicious, approachable wines, the best of which boast sneaky concentration and complexity. The 2022 vintage will be remembered as a year of big, even fat, ripe wines that have a creamy structure and a potential, in lesser wines, for too high alcohol levels and gritty tannins. However, as I will broach shortly, the 2022 Barbarescos have turned out, for the most part, remarkably better than expected. By contrast, the 2021 vintage is one of the best Barbaresco vintages of the last forty years, if not all-time, with numerous wines that rate from outstanding to exceptional. Though the 2021s are just as tannic and structured as the 2022s, they have much more elegance and grace; greater complexity; higher overall acidities; better delineated fruit; and are altogether more classic Barbarescos. In fact, the 2021 wines have much more in common with the outstanding 2019s and even more so with the even better 2016 Barbarescos. By comparison, the 2021 vintage is like the 2016 in its plethora of rich wines of powerful structure, while 2019’s wines have more tension, concentration and tannin but are noticeably less fruity and fleshy than both the 2021s and the 2016s. I would also add that, speaking generally, the wines of 2021 have somewhat darker fruit qualities than the 2019s, that instead offer greater notes of red fruit and are ultimately more vertical wines.
