Rating the most expansive Italian wines: Gaja Barbaresco 2012 tasting notes, price and characteristics

What is special about Gaja’s Barbaresco, especially this 2012 vintage?

Surely it is still a young wine with good aging potential, not great, but it can safely aspire to a twenty years old sleep in your cellar.

If the bouquet is still fresh and fine with a “work in progress” aromaticity, with blackberries, iris, cardamom, orange peel, dried flowers, mint, and earthy tones. What you don’t expect to find in a Barbaresco is such a pushed-muscular concentration.

Especially when in the background oak suggestions are so intense that they permeate all the wine, bringing out unbearable vanilla notes.

If you let it rest for a couple of hours in the glass, things improve slightly, but the disappointment remains.

About tannins now, another key aspect in Barbaresco. They are fine but do not show the thickness and dynamism you would expect from a top-notch wine… they are too silent, too tamed.

The finish is marked by excellent earthy notes, minerality, but unfortunately, those super spicy aromas come back to weigh down the wine, stifling what it is (should be?) the purest expression of Nebbiolo, above all hiding his expressive naturalness.

The use of oak has carved a dense mass of great quality from 14 of the best cru of Barbaresco and Treiso but sadly added too many frills at the expense of drinkability and authenticity.

We are in the presence of a good, but not great, wine, not yet aware of their potential, however, marked by notes of vanilla that has little to spare with real Barbaresco.

Gaja Barbaresco 2012 food pairings

Black truffle risotto, Passatelli with Parmigiano fondue and truffle, bucatini all’amatriciana, roastbeef.