Bruno Giacosa Red Label and More

Le Sommelier offers an array from the legendary Piedmontese producer.

At Le Sommelier, we are thrilled to offer the current release from legendary producer, Bruno Giacosa. Each year, we get a small allocation of his highly coveted wines. As the demand for his wines far exceed the supply, we always take whatever the winery will give us. For this release, we have four wines available, where the Barbaresco and Barolo are available in 750mL and larger formats, while the Arneis and Spumante Rosé are available in 750mL only. Due to this limited availability, these wines will not be available through the LCBO, only through this special offer.

Below are the wines and number of cases available:

Falletto di Bruno Giacosa Barbaresco Asili Riserva 2011 (RED LABEL)
99 points James Suckling, 96+ points Stephen Tanzer (reviews below)

750mL @ $489.95 per bottle (6/cs) – 12 cases available

1500mL @ $979.95 per MAGNUM (3/cs) – 5 cases available

3000mL @ $1,959.95 per DOUBLE MAGNUM (1/cs) – 4 available

Falletto di Bruno Giacosa Barolo 2012

750mL @ $309.95 per bottle (6/cs) – 9 cases available

1500mL @ $624.95 per MAGNUM (3/cs) – 3 cases available

Roero Arneis Bianco Secco 2015
750mL @ $41.95 per bottle (6/cs)

Spumante Extra Brut Rosé 2013
750mL @ $68.95 per bottle (6/cs)

A few details:

– wines are expected to land in 8-10 weeks

– prices do not include HST, bottle deposit or delivery
– wines will not be available at LCBO, only through this offer

Reviews for Falletto di Bruno Giacosa Barbaresco Asili Riserva 2011 (RED LABEL):

“This is an incredible wine that reminds me of the perfect 2000 Barolo Rocche de Falletto. Flowers, spices, leather and animals. Decadent. Dried mushrooms. Then changes to Japanese ginger and lemon peel. Full-bodied but refined and so long. It has layers of fruit and power. So refined. Ripe and intense. Perfect balance and harmony. It will be released in 2016.” – 99 points (James Suckling, JamesSuckling.com)

“Good medium red. Crushed cherry, raspberry, rose petal and botanical herbs on the tangy nose and palate. If the Santo Stefano is a more masculine, underbrushy style of nebbiolo, this one is a perfume bomb in the mouth, incredibly silky and fine-grained but with outstanding sappy tang to leaven its thickness. Most impressive today on the slowly mounting, elegant, mouth-saturating back end, which features big but fine-grained tannins and outstanding rising length. A real essence of nebbiolo.” – 96+points (Stephen Tanzer, International Wine Cellar)

I’m not sure that I could have written a better blurb on Bruno Giacosa and his wines, so I have taken a few lines from The Rare Wine Company’s website:

“Piemonte’s Langhe region is famed for the great winemakers it has produced over the past century. Yet,few can rival Bruno Giacosa for not only the stature of his work, but the dizzying number of famous wines he has made—and continues to make—over the course of a career that began in 1961. And while other men have made great wines in either Barolo or Barbaresco, only Giacosa has, for nearly a half century, produced a steady stream of heroic wines from both zones. In fact, so remarkable have been his accomplishments that his legend transcends not only Piemonte, but Italy. He is, in short, one of the profoundly great winemakers of our time.

Made only a few times a decade, Giacosa’s iconic red label riserva Barolo or Barbaresco are not only fantastically complex, rich, powerful wines capable of decades of development; they are also endowed with that rare and magical sense of extra dimension found only in the greatest wines. So high are Bruno Giacosa’s standards that, over the decades, he has deemed relatively few wines worthy of wearing the red label. As a consequence, his more typical white label releases often offer such soaring quality that we find ourselves asking why they aren’t red labels. In such cases, the difference in quality may be known only to Giacosa himself.

Giacosa is nearly as famous for his modesty as he is for the surreal character of his wines. As his legend has grown over time, many writers have made the pilgrimage to the Giacosa cantina in Neive eager to learn the details behind his wines, only to receive the simple response that he is a traditionalist. Giacosa has always preferred to let his wines do the talking. ‘Winemaking involves a great many small decisions, each affecting the next. One can only hope to get them right, to capture what there was in the grapes to begin with’ is what he told Gerald Asher in the early ’90s; this was about as far as he would go at the time in articulating his methods.”

Le Sommelier