Giving an overall assessment to a vintage is a challenging exercise not without its pitfalls, which can create excessive expectations in readers or, on the contrary, underestimate the value of quite a few wines. In fact, just as in great vintages there is no shortage of labels of lower quality than the overall value attributed to that vintage, it is equally true that in vintages considered lesser, one can often find wines worthy of the greatest attention. A consideration that applies to any denomination and even more so to Barolo, where Nebbiolo, in less favourable vintages, manages to find a plus of personality and recognisability that ‘perfect’ vintages sometimes fail to express. Having said that, scrolling through the table published above, it cannot but be evident that in the last 15 years the level of harvests has been higher and more homogeneous than in the 1970s and the first part of the 1980s, a clear expression of an ongoing climatic change but also of a certainly more careful technique and selection.