2015 Barbaresco Sori Paitin Riserva

A fantastic Barbaresco with aromas and flavors of white truffles, bark, dust, walnuts and tile, as well as plums and dried strawberries. It’s full-bodied with plenty of tannins, yet there’s a really impressive, linear feel running through it that provides tension and form. Try after 2024.

The Paitin 2015 Barbaresco Riserva Sorì Paitin Vecchie Vigne is the outlier in this group of new releases. The warm vintage has produced soft and more concentrated fruit with greater textural weight on the finish. That vintage difference, and perhaps the advanced age of the vines, makes for a bigger and broader approach, and some of those vivid high notes that we saw in the 2016 vintage are replaced here by ripe fruit, plum and iron ore. The wine is all-encompassing and soft, wrapping over the palate with smooth and lasting beauty. Production is 3,500 bottles. I can't wait to taste the upcoming 2016 vintage of this wine.

The 2015 Barbaresco Vecchie Vigne is a very pretty wine, but it also comes across as forward for this bottling. Dried cherry, blood orange, mint, dried flowers, cedar and sweet tobacco notes, along with soft contours and modest depth, are all signatures of a wine that is mature or close to it. I would not push my luck on cellaring here.