GAJA BARBARESCO COSTA RUSSI 750ML 2016

Beautiful dried strawberries, flowers and cedar with hints of tar. Full body, round and rich tannins with lots of cedar, tar and tobacco, as well as a hint of chocolate powder. Lovely, long and caressing finish. Gorgeous again. Better after 2022.

Costa Russi is an outlier for Nebbiolo sites in Barbaresco. Rather than sitting atop a hill, it is on a steep slope that spills from the end of a ridgeline towards the Tanaro River. It is cooler, fresher and higher in acid, always picked last. This wine really hit its stride seven years after its harvest. Aromatics of toasted cedar plank, rose petals, cinder and freshness marked by mint. The palate touches off on raspberries, sweet pine tar flavour and minerality mingling with umami character—an elegance of Barbaresco.

The 2016 Barbaresco Costa Russi is a very botanical wine in terms of its aromas, with lovely perfumes of rose, elderflower, sambuco and anise seed, along with a touch of glycerine. It then follows up with some sweetness that feels very embracing in this wine. This is the more ephemeral, delicate and floral member of the extended Barbaresco family from Gaja, with a crunchy tannic bite, but nothing too severe. There is a really good vitality and energy to this very expressive wine. Costa Russi remains the smallest of Gaja's single-vineyard wines, and Gaia Gaja warns that there will be considerably less of it starting with the 2017 vintage. Production for this wine had always varied greatly to begin with, due in part to the fragile nature of the 80-year-old vines, but about half of those were removed and replanted. It will be a while before the new vines are old enough to go online. So, with some 10,000 bottles made in 2016 and 6,000 bottles in 2015, we can count on those numbers to be split by half over the next three to four years, for sure.