94 John Gilman - View from the Cellar

The 2012 Nebbiolo from Giornata’s Luna Matta Vineyard is an excellent wine that really recalls a fine, classically-styled Barbaresco in its complexity and impressive transparency down to its underlying soil. The wine is made in a classic Piemontese manner, with indigenous yeasts, long macerations and fully twenty-four months aging in older casks prior to bottling. The bouquet is excellent, offering up a youthfully complex blend of red and black cherries, licorice, tar, a bit of gamebird, lovely herb tones, a superb base of soil and a topnote of camphor. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied, chewy and beautifully focused, with a fine core, excellent balance and nascent complexity, ripe tannins and a very long, soil-driven and properly structured finish. This is still a puppy and needs at least another five or six years to really start to blossom, but it is beautifully detailed already and its ultimate quality is very easy to read. Clearly the finest nebbiolo I have tasted outside of Barolo or Barbaresco! 2021-2050+