Wine Country

Piedmont lies forty miles southeast of Turin in the province of Lombardy. This is a region that’s primarily known for three things – wine, white truffles and for those of a sartorial leaning, the great mills and weavers that have been situated around Lake Como for generations.

The wines of Piedmont are some of the most nuanced and age-worthy in Italy. The two most important of the region are Barolo and Barbaresco. Both these wines are crafted from 100% Nebbiolo grapes, and often produced in similar ways, although the specific qualities of village and vineyard can lead to markedly different wines.

The problem was that come the 1980s,with the arrival of Robert Parker and The Wine Advocate, these wines seemed stuffy and archaic to some; people wanted fruit and sheen. Enter the “Barolo Boys”, a group of young, innovative wine makers, keen to explore other ways of crafting Nebbiolo. Winemakers like Elio Altare, Luciano Sandrone, and Giorgio Rivetti brought in small, new oak Barriques (casks favoured in Bordeaux) and worked hard to reduce yields of the vines to encourage intensity of fruit flavour. The new oak gave the wine a vanilla-edged gloss and richesse, while shorter macerations meant the wines weren’t tough in youth and could be enjoyed with abandon.

The market absorbed these wines enthusiastically, and many forgot about the old styles. Some of the traditionalist estates were less-than-impressed. The late, great Barolo Mascarello, who once described himself as “The Last of the Mohicans”, was famously scathing of the trend, releasing an artist’s label of the 1999 Barolo, its label emblazoned with “No Barrique, No Berlusconi!” to express his disdain for both.
Critics of the new style felt that the true varietal character of Nebbiolo was being subsumed by a fashion that was affecting many wine making regions leading to an “International” style of wine, heavy in oak and fruit character, but lacking in nuance and the essence of the land.

Two things remain undeniable, whether Trad or Modernist in leaning: Nebbiolo is a grape that ages beautifully, and it needs food to show its soulful depth. My following anecdote might provide colour to this hypothesis:

The greatest Nebbiolo I ever tasted was Gaja’s Barbaresco 1961. I was in Nassau in the Bahamas dining with a legendary collector. The wine was electric. A tar-stained, primordial beast, tempered by a graceful sense of ripe fruit, and pure varietal character. We opened the bottle late, as other diners shuffled off to bed. We ate cured horse meat, which our host had smuggled out of Lombardy. We laughed late into the blue hours of morning, giddy and alive. It’s a wine I’ll never forget.