Winemaker Notes
#59 James Suckling Top 100 Wines of the World 2025
?Chiara is an artisan grower whose philosophy is to craft wines that combine the extraordinary power of Barolo with approachability, balance, intense aromatics, and elegance.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This Barolo opens up with aromas of bright cherries, cedar and a touch of sliced mushrooms. Medium-bodied with incisive freshness. The tannins are restrained, almost timid. The wine is overall compact and solid. Very well constructed and cohesive. Needs three years to soften, but it’s really enjoyable to taste.
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Wine Spectator
Complex, fruity and solidly built, this red features cherry, strawberry, rose, green olive, leather, iron and tar flavors. Succulent and beautifully balanced, with dense, assertive tannins that are well-integrated, ending with a detailed, mouthwatering aftertaste. Best from 2030 through 2050.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The E. Pira e Figli - Chiara Boschis 2021 Barolo Mosconi is structured, linear and ultimately quite mineral in character compared to the Cannubi. Its firm underlying architecture is rendered light and fragrant thanks to aromas of blue flower, grilled herb (with both rosemary and aniseed) and pulverized stone. Fruit comes from a site in Monforte d'Alba at a cool 370 meters in elevation. I came back to this bottle 24 hours after my first tasting and remarked on the elegant, chalky nature of the tannins.
Rating: 97+ -
Jeb Dunnuck
With a slightly deeper jeweled ruby hue, the 2021 Barolo Mosconi is more contemplative, offering layered notes of cedar, cherry cordial, Asian spices, sweet herbs, and pressed flowers. It reveals broader polished depth on the palate, with ripe, refined tannins, and a long, even-keeled finish with persistent mineral underpinnings. It is only going to improve as it leans into these more brooding tertiary layers of truffle and leather, and it will be worth waiting for. Drink 2026-2056.
Rating: 96+ -
Vinous
The 2021 Barolo Mosconi is ample, creamy and resonant in the glass in its first impression. Dark red/blue fruits, leather, lavender, spice and menthol build with some coaxing. There's plenty of Mosconi substance, but Chiara Boschis has done a terrific job in taming the tannins here. This is one of the most refined wines I have ever tasted from the Mosconi cru. Time in the glass brings out the wine's structural presence, while floral overtones and insistent tannins support the driving finish.
Responsible for some of the most elegant and age-worthy wines in the world, Nebbiolo, named for the ubiquitous autumnal fog (called nebbia in Italian), is the star variety of northern Italy’s Piedmont region. Grown throughout the area, as well as in the neighboring Valle d’Aosta and Valtellina, it reaches its highest potential in the Piedmontese villages of Barolo, Barbaresco and Roero. Outside of Italy, growers are still very much in the experimentation stage but some success has been achieved in parts of California. Somm Secret—If you’re new to Nebbiolo, start with a charming, wallet-friendly, early-drinking Langhe Nebbiolo or Nebbiolo d'Alba.
The center of the production of the world’s most exclusive and age-worthy red wines made from Nebbiolo, the Barolo wine region includes five core townships: La Morra, Monforte d’Alba, Serralunga d’Alba, Castiglione Falletto and the Barolo village itself, as well as a few outlying villages. The landscape of Barolo, characterized by prominent and castle-topped hills, is full of history and romance centered on the Nebbiolo grape. Its wines, with the signature “tar and roses” aromas, have a deceptively light garnet color but full presence on the palate and plenty of tannins and acidity. In a well-made Barolo wine, one can expect to find complexity and good evolution with notes of, for example, strawberry, cherry, plum, leather, truffle, anise, fresh and dried herbs, tobacco and violets.
There are two predominant soil types here, which distinguish Barolo from the lesser surrounding areas. Compact and fertile Tortonian sandy marls define the vineyards farthest west and at higher elevations. Typically the Barolo wines coming from this side, from La Morra and Barolo, can be approachable relatively early on in their evolution and represent the “feminine” side of Barolo, often closer in style to Barbaresco with elegant perfume and fresh fruit.
On the eastern side of the Barolo wine region, Helvetian soils of compressed sandstone and chalks are less fertile, producing wines with intense body, power and structured tannins. This more “masculine” style comes from Monforte d’Alba and Serralunga d’Alba. The township of Castiglione Falletto covers a spine with both soil types.
The best Barolo wines need 10-15 years before they are ready to drink, and can further age for several decades.