Piemonte

Piemonte's winemaking history stretches back to the Romans, but the modern identity of Barolo was shaped in the nineteenth century. Until the 1800s, Nebbiolo was typically vinified as a sweet or semi-sweet wine — the dry, tannic style we know today was largely the creation of two figures: the French oenologist Louis Oudart, who advised several Langhe estates in the 1840s, and Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, who hired him to transform the wines of the region. The result was a dry, powerful, age-worthy Barolo that quickly attracted the attention of the House of Savoy and earned the wine its enduring epithet: 'the wine of kings, the king of wines.'

The twentieth century brought upheaval. The postwar decades saw a decline in quality as overproduction and poor winemaking damaged the region's reputation. The recovery began in the 1960s and accelerated through the 1970s and 1980s, driven by a new generation of producers who were willing to question everything their fathers had done — and, in some cases, by producers who were equally determined to defend it.

Barolo DOCG covers eleven communes in the Langhe, but the character of the wine varies dramatically depending on where the vines grow. The western communes — La Morra and Barolo itself — sit on Tortonian soils of compact Helvetian marl: softer, more fertile ground that produces wines of earlier accessibility, greater perfume, and a rounder, more approachable tannic structure. The eastern communes — Serralunga d'Alba, Castiglione Falletto, and Monforte d'Alba — sit on harder, more compact Helvetian soils that produce wines of greater power, more austere tannin, and exceptional longevity. The difference between a La Morra and a Serralunga is not subtle.

Barbaresco, the smaller appellation to the northeast of Alba, is often described as Barolo's more elegant sibling. The soils here are similar to those of La Morra — Tortonian marl — and the wines tend to be more approachable in youth, with a silkier texture and a more immediately expressive aromatic profile. The three main communes — Barbaresco, Neive, and Treiso — each produce wines of distinct character, and the single-vineyard wines from the great crus (Asili, Rabajà, Santo Stefano, Gallina) are among the most sought-after in Italy.

No debate in Italian wine has been more fiercely contested than the one that divided Barolo producers in the 1980s and 1990s. The Modernists — led by Elio Altare, Domenico Clerico, and Roberto Voerzio, and influenced by visits to Burgundy and Bordeaux — argued that traditional Barolo, with its years of maceration in large old Slavonian oak botti and its decade-long wait before approachability, was a wine that had lost touch with the modern market. They introduced shorter macerations, rotary fermenters, and small French barriques to produce wines that were richer, more immediately accessible, and more internationally recognisable.

The Traditionalists — Giacomo Conterno, Bartolo Mascarello, and the Cavalotto family among them — held their ground. Long macerations, large old oak, no barriques, no shortcuts: the wines needed time, and the market would have to wait. The debate was bitter enough to earn the name 'the Barolo Wars,' and it split families, friendships, and the appellation's reputation for a generation. Today, the war is largely over — not because one side won, but because the best producers on both sides have converged on a middle ground of quality that makes the old battle lines seem less important than the wines themselves.

Piemonte is far more than Barolo and Barbaresco. Barbera d'Asti and Barbera d'Alba — the everyday red of the Langhe — has been transformed in the past thirty years from a simple, acidic quaffer into a wine of genuine complexity and age-worthiness, particularly in the hands of producers like Giacomo Bologna of Braida, who pioneered the use of barriques for Barbera in the 1980s. Dolcetto, the third red variety of the Langhe, produces wines of deep colour, soft tannin, and bitter-cherry fruit that are among the most food-friendly in Italy.

In the north of the region, the Nebbiolo-based wines of Gattinara, Ghemme, and the other Alto Piemonte appellations are attracting renewed attention from collectors who find the prices of Barolo increasingly prohibitive. And in the south, the Moscato d'Asti of the Canelli hills — low-alcohol, gently sparkling, intensely perfumed — remains one of Italy's most underrated pleasures: a wine that tastes of peach blossom and apricot and asks nothing of the drinker except a willingness to be charmed.