Elio Grasso Barolo Casa Mate Magnum 2020
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Winery: Elio Grasso
Vintage: 2020
Grape: Nebbiolo
Drinking window: 2025 - 2045
Region: Piedmont
Production: 14.000 bottles
THE ITALIAN GRAPE (97)
The Casa Mate 2019 is one of the best wines I tasted during my trip in Piedmont. Exceptionally beautiful complexity, exactly what I look for when I think of Barolo. This is a wine that certainly needs the 10 year mark to show its beauty and drink well. Yet the wine became more and more open during the tasting, lots of dark fruit was present with an intense nose of leather and tobacco in a way of cigar box. Really typical dark Barolo characteristics. I love it!
ROBERT PARKER (97)
The Elio Grasso 2019 Barolo Ginestra Casa Maté starts off a bit shy, or closed, and I was never fully able to get the wine to open. I decanted two bottles and went back over the course of a few days to check on their progress. That said, the wine never let its guard down. It remained super tight and compact over the course of my long evaluation. Given the care and reputation of this estate, I'm betting on a very long cellar evolution for this bottle. With fruit from a three-hectare plot in Ginestra, it offers beautiful structure with integrated acidity and tannins. The mouthfeel is gorgeous, but I wish the wine would offer more on the bouquet. Red fruit and wild berry are followed by grilled herb, crushed flower and dried lilac. The aromatic playlist is subtle and hushed. An ample 14,000 bottles were produced, and I hope to encounter this wine again sometime in the future when it has evolved.
About the wine
Elio Grasso stands as a cornerstone in the world of Barolo wine production. Despite maintaining his roots as a farmer, Elio, alongside his wife, initiated a qualitative transformation in the 1970s, elevating both the wines and the vineyards. They meticulously replanted each vineyard parcel, hand-selecting the finest nebbiolo grapes while also venturing into the cultivation of international varieties like Chardonnay. Situated within the Ginestra vineyard on the eastern outskirts of the Monforte municipality, the winery occupies a revered position. This location has long been hailed as the premier site within the village, albeit one of the most intricate due to its soils abundant in blue marl.
Elio Grasso first produced the Cru Casa Mate in 1978. The vineyard, planted in the early 1970s, is situated at an altitude between 300 and 350 meters with a southern exposure. The soil is a mix of medium limestone and clay, and the vineyard has a planting density of 4,500 vines per hectare. The grapes are hand-harvested from late October to early November, then gently pressed at the winery. Fermentation occurs in large steel vats, followed by aging in Slavonian oak barrels for 30 months. After this, the wine is bottled and further refined in the estate's cellars for an additional 12 months.
The 2019 vintage in Barolo was excellent, though not in the usual sense of an exemplary year. The key to the finest wines lay in the stylistic and qualitative decisions made in the winery. Growers refer to 2019 as a classic vintage due to its delayed start and mid-October harvest, patterns unseen in the three preceding years and those that followed. Winter was drier than usual, but April, May, July, and September saw ample rainfall. September brought warm days and cool nights, ideal for developing aromas, sugars, and ripe tannins—characteristics of a classic vintage. Many consider 2019 most similar to 2016.
