2022 Mauro Marengo, Dolcetto d’Alba DOC, Piemonte, Italy.
The wines of Mauro Marengo are exciting offerings and it looks like Daniele Marengo is a rising super star in Piemonte, and Barolo in particular, with an excellent set of new releases now hitting the shelves, including his valued priced Langhe Nebbiolo and this beautifully crafted garnet hued Dolcetto d’Alba, which is drinking seriously delicious. Dark berry, mixed spice and floral notes lead the way on the nose and leading on the medium bodied and nicely firm palate with brambly crushed blackberry, plum, currant and cherry fruits, along with supple tannin, mountain herbs, violets, dusty peppery spice and grilled fennel notes. Daniele Marengo’s Dolcetto sees a fermentation that lasts between 8-10 days with a couple of daily pump-overs depending on the vintage. After pressing, it checks into 25hl steel tanks for hibernation until the following spring. Depending on each vat’s level of reductive elements, they may be racked three to four times during élevage and then again once or twice prior to bottling, all of which creates a wine of aromatic intensity and purity of form that is ready to drink right away, as this one shows. I really enjoyed this Dolcetto and suggest searching it out and enjoy it with a traditional Italian meal.
The US importer The Source Imports says the Marengo family’s technical direction, as mentioned in my first review of Marengo’s Nebbiolo, was given to Daniele, the latest generation here, at age twenty-two, his personal taste and style of wines led him to pursue freshness over power and ripeness, and to highlight their Novello-based high-altitude vineyards, which you can see here. He also turned their attention to soil health and the incorporation organic farming in their vineyards. The cellar work, as the importer adds is gentler now, and new techniques have been employed, but the traditional style didn’t disappear in the profile, it was just complimented. In recent years, to down play ripeness, Marengo harvests a little earlier, have even considered doing whole cluster and submerged cap fermentation(s) when those traditional methods need a boost. Daniele gently extracts tannin and tries to retain acidity, and ages his varietal wines in a combination of concrete vats and medium-sized oak botti, or in this case stainless steel. These younger, no pretense offerings from Marengo are studied examples that thrive on their purity of form with clean lines and structures. This approach, which is a success to me, promotes transparency and authenticy of terroir and varietal character, in this case that’s all good!
($22 Est.) 92 Points, grapelive