Making wine at Luca Roagna’s level requires intensity and maybe even fanaticism. Spend any amount of time with him and you will quickly observe plenty of both. As he pours you a sip of wine to taste, everyone watches in silence, and you can tell he is mustering every effort to pour it perfectly: precisely the right amount, no errant drip.

Fortunately for us, Luca applies this same degree of perfectionism to the 20-25 year old vines that grow in his most significant holdings: Pira, in Barolo, and Pajé, in Barbaresco. He takes those grapes and he blends them together into a large vat. He lets them macerate, and later rest in cask, for longer than most producers do with actual Barolo.

In short, he does everything that is required to make a wine that he could label Barolo or Barbareco, except for one: he incorporates grapes from both DOCGs in the same wine.

Why does he do this? When vines are young, they do a poor job of expressing terroir. What is the point of putting the name of a single Cru on a bottle if the vines that produced it are too young to actually communicate the soul of that Cru? You might as well blend it up and instead express the intense beauty of the Nebbiolo grape grown in the Langhe hills.

This is what Roagna’s 2020 Rosso delivers: incredibly charming Nebbiolo that is far more than merely fruity, and that will age gracefully like a Barolo. A recently consumed 2013 was spot on! That, however, was a brooding and backwards vintage. Today’s 2020 comes from a vintage of light beams and perfume, and you can already start to enjoy this wine — though do make sure you grab a couple of extra bottles to see how they evolve over the next five years or so.

Roagna, Langhe Rosso, 2020 $59.99