I decanted this bruiser for an hour before we drank it, but it could have taken even more. The color is dark purple, almost black, all the way up to the edges. Swirling aromas of violets, olive tapenade, and notes of fresh tar spill forth from the glass, followed by a medium-to-full bodied, teeth-staining liquid, sleek but powerful, well-made but appealingly rustic, with flavors of black cherry liqueur, black fig, dates, and notes of burnt cinnamon toast, diesel, and peaty earth. Clearly built for cult fanatics with very cold cellars, this wine has a few years’ ageing behind it, but betrays its youth by being slightly closed, still; this wine tastes like no other wine, and I can sense there’s a lot more complexity hiding somewhere. We drank it with a special Italian feast on Christmas Eve, and I especially enjoyed it with picoline and Moroccan olives. A thick, smoky rabbit ragu would have been perfect, too.

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Clearly we’re dealing here with one of the world’s great collectible red wines. It’s a “vin du garde,” that is, a wine to hold for a while before breaking out for a special occasion, like a holiday dinner. But which one? First-growth Bordeaux? Grand Cru Burgundy? High-end Napa Cabernet? We can safely rule out California because of all those secondary characteristics, like olives and earth. Bordeaux might offer more evidence of new oak (cedar, vanilla), Burgundy of red cherry and finesse. There are only a few other long-lived wines that command this kind of respect in the collectors’ market worldwide: Pingus from Spain, Grange from Australia – and Barolos from Italy. Let’s go with the former for a second, especially because this red matches so beautifully with Italian food. And Barolos, which are made in Italy’s Piedmont region from a single grape, nebbiolo, are often made with grapes from one vineyard so that the characteristics of that special plot of land can shine through; this might explain the uniqueness of this wine. Finally, Barolos are known for combining complexity (especially on the nose) with attractive rusticity. Since this wine was clearly had a propitious birth and comes with good genes, let’s guess it came from the legendary 1997 vintage in Piedmont, and from the well-known vineyard named Cerequio. We’d be right. The winemaker is Roberto Voerzio, it set me back $115 in 2001, and I’d give this Cerequio until about 2010 to start showing its true colors.