Roagna’s 2004 Barolo La Rocca e la Pira is awesome. A sensual, layered Barolo, the wine emerges from the glass with gorgeous inner perfume, power and depth in its dark fruit. The aromatics seem to be developing faster than the fruit and structural components. My impression is that this won’t be a terribly long-lived wine, but it should drink well to age twenty or so. Anticipated maturity: 2014-2024. Importer: Louis/Dressner Selections, New York, NY; tel. (212) 334-8191

The 2003 Barolo La Rocca e La Pira, from vines between 20 and 50 years of age, is an expressive wine graced with dark cherries, plums, spices, cedar, menthol and minerals in a surprisingly accessible style for this producer. Medium in body, the wine offers superb length and finessed tannins that caress the palate through to the close. This is a little rounder, deeper and also plusher than the decidedly firm and austere Paje, and it is nearly as sublime. Here, too, Roagna passed on making a Riserva, blending the juice from their best lots into this entry-level Barolo. Anticipated maturity: 2010-2028. Roagna is one of the most fascinating properties in Piedmont. The family owns small, but choice, plots in some of the region's best vineyards. The estate makes a wide range of wines, but the Barbarescos and Barolos are the highlights. In top vintages there can be as many as three selections of Barbaresco (Barbaresco Paje, Barbaresco Riserva Paje and Barbaresco Crichet Paje) and two of Barolo (Barolo La Rocca e La Pira, Barolo Riserva La Rocca e La Pira). The wines are fermented in oak vats and remain on the skins until mid-December, after which they are aged in oak barrels for as many as a dozen years prior to being bottled. This year Roagna has three new wines; a Barbera made from vines in the La Rocca e La Pira vineyard in Castiglione Falletto, and small-production Barbarescos from the Asili and Montefico vineyards. Among the many highlights are the 2003 Barolo La Rocca e La Pira and Barbaresco Paje, which are both exceptional (there were no Riservas made that year), the 2004 Barbera d-Alba, the 2004 Barbaresco Asili, the 1995 Barolo Riserva La Rocca e La Pira and the 2000 Barbaresco Crichet Paje. As readers can deduce, the wines are usually released later than most and can be hard to find, but they are increasingly worth the effort. Quality has never been higher here, and as I have written before, Luca Roagna is one of Piedmont's most promising young producers. Importer: Louis/Dressner Selections, New York, NY; tel. (212) 334-8191

The estate’s 2001 Barolo La Rocca e La Pira is a big, powerful wine endowed with masses of dark fruit, earthiness, leather, licorice, spices and tobacco. The wine offers tremendous length and persistence on the palate as its inner core of fruit emerges over time. Somewhat reticent at first, the wine needs quite a bit of time to open up. Some tasters might object to the less than clean aromatics but after tasting two bottles of this Barolo I felt the wine had sufficient merits to compensate for those imperfections. The Barolo is made from the estate’s younger vines, with ages ranging from 20-50 years. The wine saw 80 days of maceration on the skins (in wood vats) followed by five years in oak prior to bottling. Anticipated maturity: 2011-2025. 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