1964 | Sebastiano Musso | Barbaresco

Detailed Description

This full-boded red offers aromas evoking blue flower, baked plum and pipe tobacco. The firm but polished palate shows concentration and structure, featuring dried cherry, steeped prune and licorice set against fine-grained tannins.

Producer Information

Sebastiano Musso started his small winery at the break of the Great Depression in Italy. He was determined and passionate about the business and the potential of Barbaresco’s terroir. He began with a small amount of ground in the locality of Cavanna and one on the hillside of Ronchi. The years to follow would prove to be difficult with World War II and the after war years. He managed to keep his winemaking business afloat and began selling the wines. In the sixties he understood that it would take more grapes and help in his vineyards and winery to expand his operation. In the 1960s, his son Augusto joined the family business to make wines and carry on his father’s legacy. In 1966 he began to see real commercial success on the Barbaresco wine. Augusto brought youth and enthusiasm to the vinery and him and his father continued to expand. The winemaking facilities and vineyards have developed with their success and size but Musso remains a small, carefully managed operation, producing around only 80,000 bottles a Musso focuses on organic methods of wine production, making wines with minimal additions of sulphites. These are some of the finest wines of the Piedmont region, a result of the hard work and persistence of Sebastiano and Augusto. The land is mostly limestone with frequent layers of clay that give a particular thickness to the soil. After harvesting the grapes by hand, they are put in small containers, destemmed, then softly pressed. A portion of the juice from the grapes is fermented in steel tanks, while the other half performs the same path in barrels of 500 litres. At the end of vinification these halves make up two types of new wine which are then blended for the best result. The wine ageing then comes, where the wine spends a few months in barrels of 500 litres and after matures in larger barrels of 20 hectolitres. All of this totals to about 12 months before the bottling begins. The wine is bottled in spring and summer after completing its time in the barrels. They are then laid down to spend 5 or 6 months in the bottle ageing, more before being released on the market.