Robert Camuto, Contributing Editor for Wine Spectator, writes of his recent visit to Sandrone earlier this winter to get a first hand account of the wineries’ new Super Barolo. Camuto writes that over the past 40 years Luciano Sandrone’s winery gone from producing product our of his garage to earning the status of a Barolo legend. During his visit, Camuto became on of the fist people to taste the newly released and perhaps most eccentric project of the Lucaino’s career — Vite Taline. Interestingly, this “project” dates back almost 30 years ago when Sandrone was was renting a small parcel of vines in the Le Coste cru, south of Barolo village. In working the vineyard, owned by a grower known locally as Talin, Sandrone was drawn to a single scraggly vine that produced smaller leaves in the spring followed by miniature bunches and berries in the growing season. As a kind of game, the brothers began to experiment with the unique grape, eventually field grafting cuttings from that vine onto already planted rootstock in different sites. Eventually they had about 2,000 plants of the mystery Nebbiolo in Le Coste and two other vineyards around Barolo village.
To read more about Sandrone and the progression of Vite Taline to its current status of Super Barolo, read the full story HERE.
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Sandrone
Piedmont, Italy
The late Luciano Sandrone was an iconic figure in Barolo, with an extraordinary story of determination. In the bottle, Sandrone’s wines straddle the modern and traditional styles of the region: elegant, attractive and easy to appreciate right from their first years in bottle, but with no less power and structure over time than traditional Barolos.