Monfortino, and the years it was not made.

Barolo Monfortino is made by Giacomo Conterno at Monforte d'Alba, and it is the most uncompromising wine in Piedmont. It is produced only in vintages the house judges worthy, fermented for far longer than modern practice, and aged for around seven years in large Slavonian oak casks before bottling. A Monfortino released today was harvested when the buyer's circumstances were entirely different.

This cellar holds the 1955, 1961, 1964, 1974 and the hundred-point 1978, and single bottles of several later vintages.

Why the wine is declared and not simply made

Nebbiolo is a late grape on marl hills, and it fails in wet years. Conterno's answer has always been to make Monfortino only when the vintage supports the style, and otherwise to make none. That is the same logic Champagne uses for a vintage declaration, applied to a red wine with seven years of cask ahead of it.

The consequence for a collector is that the run is not continuous, and cannot be. An absent year in a Monfortino sequence is not a hole in the collection. It is the estate's verdict on that harvest, recorded.

Cascina Francia

The estate bought the Cascina Francia vineyard in Serralunga d'Alba in 1974, and from 1978 Monfortino has come from that site. The wines before and after that change are both Monfortino, and they are not quite the same proposition: the earlier bottles were made from purchased fruit selected across the zone, the later ones from a single, known, south-west facing slope.

This matters when reading a vertical. The 1955, the 1961 and the 1964 belong to the first era. The 1978 opens the second, and is the bottle most often described as the finest Barolo of the twentieth century.

The five vintages here

1955. A fine, classical Piedmont year and a bottle from the period when Monfortino was made in very small quantity for a market that barely existed outside Italy.

1961. Warm, dry and late, with the structure Nebbiolo needs to run for decades. One of the great post-war Langhe vintages.

1964. Ripe and complete, and the most generous of the three old bottles here.

1974. A firm year that has aged better than the vintages on either side of it, and consistently underestimated as a result.

1978. The legend. A cold, late spring cut the crop drastically; a long dry autumn ripened what was left into a wine of enormous tannin and acidity that took thirty years to open, and scores one hundred points. It is also the first Monfortino entirely from Cascina Francia.

Reading a Monfortino price

Three things move it, and only one of them is the score.

The era. Pre-1978 bottles are scarcer and older, and are priced on condition more than on vintage reputation. Ask for the fill level before anything else.

The release date. Because the wine sits seven years in cask, the market for a given vintage develops late and moves slowly. A Monfortino does not behave like a Bordeaux first growth, whose price is set at release.

Quantity. These are single bottles, not cases. What that does to price is the subject of the note on single-bottle lots.