Roagna’s 1999 Barbaresco Riserva Crichet Paje is an extremely primary, dense wine loaded with dark red fruit. Notes of smoke, earthiness, cedar and tobacco emerge in the glass, rounding out this powerful, masculine Barbaresco. Noticeably better on the palate than on the nose, the Riserva Crichet Paje comes across as a wine that probably spent too much time in oak. It remains an imposing but also vibrant wine that should develop beautifully in bottle. The tannins are big, but also well-integrated. The Crich?t Paj? is made from vines with an average age of 60 years. The wine saw an incredible 90 days of maceration in wood vats followed by eight years in oak. Anticipated maturity: 2009-2029. This is a fascinating set of wines from Roagna, a historic estate in Barbaresco that is once again gaining the visibility and recognition it deserves. Proprietor Luca Roagna is young, humble and incredibly passionate about preserving his family’s traditional approach to making wine. The estate works with old vines, which are trained to ripen late. In the cellar, macerations are very long and aging takes place primarily in French oak casks. Roagna is one of Italy’s most promising young producers and his future looks to be very bright. This year, as last, I found some of the wines not fully perfect in their aromatics, with notes of woodiness that suggest the wines may be spending too much time in barrel. According to Luca Roagna, these aromas and flavors can be attributed to the new barrels the estate began using around 2000. Still, my sense is that the wines could achieve an entirely different level of quality if a few years of the barrel aging were replaced with time in bottle.Importer: Louis Dressner Selections, New York, NY; tel. (212) 334-8191