Barbera is a grape usually planted on less expensive real estate, and it’s generally considered a lesser cousin to the Nebbiolo and used for the region’s table wine. “Barbera was the wine of the people,” Currado explains, but thanks to Vietti and a few other determined producers it has in recent years become a star.
It was traditionally grown in cooler, less desirable plots in Alba, the province that encompasses both Barolo and Barbaresco, and in the neighboring province of Asti, best known for bubbly Asti Spumante. Barbera has a very deep ruby color and a full body. For years it played a secret, supporting role in the production of Barolo, where it was often used to supplement the color and body of Nebbiolo, which can be low on both. When Luca joined the family winery, his father wouldn’t let him near the Nebbiolo. The young winemaker worked instead with Barbera from their holdings outside the Barolo appellation. The more he worked with Barbera, the more he became convinced of its potential, given the right sites and restricted yields. When a patch of Vietti vines in the Grand Cru region of Castiglione required replanting, he took charge of the project, secretly replacing the Nebbiolo vines with Barbera. Eventually, some of the neighbors noticed. “They were laughing,” he says. “They went to my father and asked why we’d planted Barbera in prime Barolo land. My father was pissed off.” But eventually he seemed to forgive his son, due to the quality of the wine from those rogue vines. In fact there was a precedent for Luca’s experiment. His great-grandfather went to America, becoming an engineer, after his older brother inherited the winery. (He worked on the Sumner Tunnel in Boston, among other public-works projects.) When the elder brother died, he returned to Italy to run the family business. He planted a small patch of Barbera on the hill beneath the house for his personal consumption, out of nostalgia for the table wine of his youth. These vines have survived to the present, although many of the Vietti vineyards were confiscated by the Fascists when it was discovered that the family was supporting and sheltering partisans.
The wines produced by these very old vines, planted in 1932, are a testament to the potential of Barbera in ideal sites. A 1990 Vietti Scarrone Vigna Vecchia (old vines), which Luca opened for me at the winery alongside a flight of Barolos, pretty much stole the show, even as it demonstrated a family resemblance with its tar, leather, and mushroom notes. Like Currado himself, who wore a very well-tailored bespoke shirt over dirty jeans and work boots, it seemed to oscillate between sophistication and rusticity.
Vietti wasn’t the only producer who saw in Barbera a potential Cinderella; another champion was the late Giacomo Bologna, a motorcycle-riding, jazz-loving bon vivant who inherited a property called Braida some ten miles east of the town of Asti. Like an old Hollywood studio head ordering cosmetic procedures for a starlet, Bologna set about to reshape Barbera, which is typically very high in acid and low in natural tannins. (The latter, which most of us are familiar with from over-steeped tea, act as a preservative, allowing a wine to develop complexity over time.) He planted Barbera on prime, sun-drenched slopes and picked the grapes later than his neighbors, with the idea of softening the sharp acidity. He aged the juice in new French oak barrels, which further softened the sharp edges while lending some wood tannins. The idea of barrel aging Barbera was first proposed by the famous French oenologist Émile Peynaud, who consulted at a winery in Asti in the nineteen seventies. In 1982, Bologna created Bricco dell’ Uccellone, a barrel-aged vineyard-designated Barbera that changed the perception of the grape in the Piedmont region and moreover achieved international recognition. Unlike the rustic table wine beloved of Piedmontese farmers, poured out of pitchers at kitchen tables, this was a Barbera that had been to college, maybe even graduate school. It was suitable for high-end wine lists.
Other makers have followed the examples of Bologna and Vietti, planting the grape in better real estate and giving it the spa treatment in the cellar, creating premium barrel-aged examples in both Asti and Alba. According to Currado, Barbera d’Alba is typically more feminine and sophisticated, while Barbera d’Asti is more powerful and bold; he likens it to Angelina Jolie and Alba to Grace Kelly. Undoubtedly he knows whereof he speaks, although winemaker styles can sometimes trump terrain.
Some thirty years after Bologna started experimenting with French oak barrels, there are many styles of Barbera, including simple table wines meant to be consumed early. In this category, price is a reliable indicator of quality and ageability. Wines in the $15–$20 range should be easy to appreciate on release, tossed back with a pizza or a simple pasta. Barbera specialists like Bologna and Hilberg-Pasquero inevitably make great juice. But some of the best come from makers of Barolo and Barbaresco, like Vietti, Giuseppe Mascarello, Sandrone, Giacomo Conterno, and La Spinetta. It’s a great wine to keep in mind when you pick up the list at an Italian restaurant. Even when softened by barrel aging, Barbera is relatively acidic for a red, which makes it the ideal companion for any dish that features tomatoes. The chef Thomas Keller, who honed his pasta-making skills in Luca Currado’s grandmother’s kitchen before opening the French Laundry, became a fan during his stay there. “They’re simple and easy to appreciate,” he says. Currado sees it as a bridge between New World and Old World reds. “It’s sexy but earthy,” he posits, “and Barolo’s more reserved and severe.” And while Barolo can take years and even decades to mellow out and become palatable, even the most sophisticated Barbera is approachable—and downright convivial—in its youth.
Reasons to Be Cheerful: Barolo and Barbaresco
Now that the war is over, the Piedmont is thriving. Since 1996, the region has enjoyed an amazing string of successful vintages, and somewhere along the way modernists and traditionalists seem to have signed a truce. Happily for consumers, its great Nebbiolo wines, Barolo and Barbaresco, are still less renowned than Bordeaux and Burgundy, but no less worthy of respect.
Like Burgundy, the historically independent Piedmont is full of proud farmers and small estates. Like Pinot Noir, the signature red grape of Burgundy, Nebbiolo is thin-skinned and temperamental and yields wines of tremendous aromatic complexity. Unlike Burgundy, which seems to get a great vintage every three years or so, the Piedmont has been on a roll since 1996 with only a single washout vintage, the soggy 2002. The 2003 vintage was somewhat mixed, complicated by the hot weather that affected all of Europe. Most of the top wines of Piedmont’s Barolo and Barbaresco districts still sell for well below $100, and many retail for less than $50, even in this era of a pathetically weak dollar. And just in case you’re a pedant, the region is more than complicated enough to absorb a lifetime of study.
In Italy, Barolo has long been known as the king of wines, in part because of its association with the house of Savoy and the family of Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of a unified Italy, in part because of its unquestioned preeminence. Most commentators agree that the wine as we know it, a dry 100 percent Nebbiolo, was probably conjured into being in the early nineteenth century by the French oenologist Louis Oudart, who was working for the Marchioness of Barolo. Generally speaking, the Barolo denomination, situated south and west of Alba, produces bigger, longer-lived wines than Barbaresco, to the north and east of the town, though the similarities outweigh the differences.
Angelo Gaja, who is to the Nebbiolo grape what Yo-Yo Ma is to the cello, has a favorite analogy to describe its discreet charms. “Cabernet is like John Wayne,” he told me over dinner at Guido da Castiglione, a hillside restaurant not far from his home in the little town of Barbaresco. “When he walks into a room, no one else exists. All the men want to be him, and the women want to sleep with him. Nebbiolo is like Marcello Mastroianni. He walks into the room with a woman on his arm, and he makes the woman look more beautiful.” His point is that Nebbiolo will never be as powerful or as self-sufficient as Cab; it requires food in order to present itself at its best.
“Cab is like a guy who’s a show-off; Nebbiolo is shy and seductive,” says Angelo’s twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Gaia Gaja, who joined him in the business in 2001.
With a name like hers, how could she stay away? Gaia grew up in the village of Barbaresco, where wine is pretty much the only game in town. At the local grade school, she and her friends made wine and grappa with grapes they brought in from their family vineyards. Like her father, Gaia has an excess of nervous energy; she drums her fingers on the table at New York’s Insieme as she waits for my verdict on her 2003 Barolo Sperss.
“Barbaresco is a little sweeter, with notes of balsamic, violets, cumin, and spice,” Gaia says. “Barolo is deeper and has more tobacco, mushrooms, and licorice.” The timeworn descriptor for the smell of Barolo is “tar and roses.” Many devotees find the funky scent of white truffles, which are native to Piedmont, in aged examples of both, and it’s hard to think of a better accompaniment to a risotto with white truffles.
Along with Renato Ratti and Domenico Clerico, Angelo Gaja was among the pioneers who experimented with new production methods, including the use of new French oak barrels, to make Nebbiolo more accessible. In the past, a typical Barolo, which might spend five years or more in huge casks called botti, would take twenty years or so to shed its formidable tannins and show the full range of its charms. Since the mid-eighties a debate—verging on a battle—has raged between the traditionalists and the so-called modernists. Producers like Aldo and Giacomo Conterno, Giuseppe Rinaldi, and Bartolo Mascarello in Barolo and Bruno Giacosa in Barbaresco upheld the traditions, including long fermentation and aging in giant chestnut botti. Until his death in 2005, Bartolo Mascarello led the battle against barriques—the smaller barrels that began showing up in the seventies—the traditionalists believing that new French oak, with its vanilla flavor, masks the true character of the Nebbiolo grape and the Piedmont terroir.
Aldo Conterno, looking very much the epitome of tradition in English tweeds when we met at his estate in 2005, proudly informed me that his Barolos weren’t drinkable in their first decade of life. By law, Barolo must be aged at the winery for three years before release, and some makers like Conterno hold their wine back even longer, but these traditional wines are made for the patient and for those with wine cellars.
Not long ago these fierce, old-school Barolos seemed in danger of extinction. In 1973, Robert Mondavi visited the area and met the young Angelo Gaja, among others. Mondavi was at that moment helping to usher in a new golden age of wine making in Napa, and Gaja was inspired to do something similar. “It’s fantastic what Mondavi did for California,” he says. “He saw the potential before anyone else. Also here he saw the potential. He says that everyone in Piedmont is sleeping. And he’s right. We were all sleeping.” In other words, tradition needed a jolt of innovation if the wines of the Piedmont were to become a force in the emerging international marketplace, which was increasingly shaped by New World palates and the demand for bolder, fruitier, more precocious wines. Gaja and fellow modernists like Altare, Sandrone, Scavino, and Valentino believed the old, recycled botti were frequently tainted with bacteria and adopted new equipment and production methods such as rotary fermentors and barriques to soften the acid and tannin that make Nebbiolo so formidable in its youth. The small French oak barrels increase oxygen contact with the young wine, speeding its evolution, and sometimes impart those toasty vanilla flavors (which the traditionalists deplore). In 1985, according to Luca Currado, the fourth-generation winemaker at Vietti in Castiglione Falletto, the revolutionaries staged a festive “Bonfire of the Botti” in Barolo, burning a pile of the old casks to symbolize their rejection of tradition.
Bartolo Mascarello, fiercely traditionalist about wine making but a progressive in his politics, emblazoned “No Barrique, No Berlusconi” on the label of his 1999 Barolo; the slogan quickly became a rallying cry for the old school. When I first visited the Piedmont around this time, tensions were running high. When I met Giuseppe Rinaldi, a close friend of Mascarello’s, he was lying in the driveway in front of his Beaux Arts villa in Barolo, poking a wrench into the innards of his Yamaha dirt bike. Clearly, dinner was going to be late. A wry, modest former veterinarian who inherited his father’s estate, Rinaldi doesn’t speak English—his wife translated—but when we finally sat down at a nearby restaurant, he made his point emphatically as he dumped some 1997 Barolo into his risotto. He railed against new oak and what he saw as the pandering to the global market. “If you have a particular wine with a particular smell and taste, it’s silly to waste it, to make a standard wine for international taste.” Later, we were joined by his neighbor Chiara Boschis, a chic, petite young woman in a Prada sport ensemble, who holds a doctorate in economics and speaks fluent English. Boschis comes from an old wine-making family, but since she purchased an estate called Pira, she’s been turning out an “international” sexy beast of a Barolo that had recently copped 96 points from Robert Parker. With her arrival the talk veered from wine to the less contentious area of politics. They were united, at least, in their disdain for Berlusconi.
By the mid-nineties it seemed the modernists had won the battle, promoting a richer, darker, and yet softer style of Nebbiolo that could be enjoyed much sooner than the old-school juice. I like to call them wines of cleavage, hey-there-big-boy reds that seem designed to grab the attention of critics looking for the wow factor. These wines were making stars of their makers even as they revitalized the moribund local agricultural economy. But a few loyalists, myself included, couldn’t help noticing that some of the new-school wines from the eighties weren’t aging all that well, that they were either cracking up or failing to evolve over time into something more interesting, which is the mark of truly great wine and one of the particular glories of Barolo. Far from achieving greatness after thirty or forty years, like, say, the 1964 Giacomo Conterno Monfortino or the 1982 Bruno Giacosa Santo Stefano, they were washing out before they hit their teens.
“The only way we can survive,” says Luca Currado, the cosmopolitan proprietor of Vietti, “is to make a wine that reflects the region.” Currado stands somewhere in the middle of the debate, which seems like a good place to be.
Over the past twenty years many of the brash upstarts have quietly revised and refined their techniques, sometimes reducing the amount of new wood they use, while some of the traditionalists have quietly adopted newfangled tools; the battle lines are not so sharply drawn as before. But even the most modern styles are slow bloomers by New World standards. Powerful structured vintages like 2004 and 2006 will benefit from a decade of aging, in most instances, and will continue to develop long afterward. The very good 2007 vintage is more approachable and seductive; many of the wines were drinking brilliantly on release in 2011, although they will certainly benefit from age.
One way to become enamored of Nebbiolo is to start with Barbaresco, the precocious sister of Barolo. Barbaresco regulations require only two years of aging, which means that the wines are released into the marketplace earlier. The local cooperative, the Produttori del Barbaresco, might just be the world’s best wine-producing co-op and is a great source of high-quality, accessible, but age-worthy Barbarescos in the $30 to $50 dollar range. They usually shine within a few years and also age extremely well: I was blown away by a bottle of 1982 Barbaresco from the Produttori that a friend opened for me in 2011.
Caveat emptor: as with Burgundian Pinot Noir, inconsistency and mystery are part of what draws some of us to this region and this grape. If you are looking for something utterly unique, a wine that in the same breath can smell like flowers and the dirt and compost they spring from, a wine that could hardly be mistaken for a wine from any other part of the globe, you need to visit the Piedmont, if only in the glass.
Blood, Sweat, and Leaps of Faith
The sun has yet to clear the peaks of the Palisades above the vineyard, and the grapes are still cool to the touch as the pickers, along with a groggy journalist visiting from New York, move up the manicured rows of Sauvignon Blanc, slicing the clusters and dropping them into small plastic bins that are emptied into larger collection bins at the end of each row, where Bart and Daphne Araujo go
through the grapes, picking out leaves and discarding sunburned grapes. “I love the first day of harvest,” says the elegant, silver-haired Daphne as she plucks out a shriveled grape.
This is the twentieth harvest since the couple bought the Eisele Vineyard, which was first planted in 1886 and has since become renowned for its Cabernet Sauvignon. Today they are harvesting a small lot of Sauvignon Blanc planted in a cooler area of the vineyard. This small patch of white grapes is less than an acre, and it’s picked in just over an hour. The journalist is tired and bleeding copiously after slicing his hand with the scimitar-shaped harvesting knife, but the Araujos seem positively exhilarated as they stride back to their house for breakfast, past meticulously pruned vines laden with knee-high clusters of purple grapes. Almost as many clusters are scattered on the ground, victims of a recent purge, sacrificed in order to concentrate the flavors of the surviving grapes, which Bart predicts will need another two to three weeks of hang time. The thirty-two acres of Bordeaux varietal vines yield an average of just sixteen hundred cases of their top Cabernet Sauvignon, one of the Napa Valley’s iconic wines.
Certain privileged sites yield great wine as a result of some serendipitous combination of geology, topography, and microclimate. Located on an alluvial fan in the northeastern corner of Napa near the hot-springs town of Calistoga, this one was celebrated long before the Araujos bought it in 1990. Beginning in 1975, Joseph Phelps purchased grapes from the Eisele family and made a Cabernet that would become one of Napa’s defining wines, though for some reason Phelps passed when the Eiseles decided to sell the vineyard, at which point Bart Araujo pounced.
A San Francisco native, Araujo went to USC with ambitions of becoming a major-league baseball player until injuries forced him to reconsider. After Harvard Business School, he returned to California and founded a successful construction business. He met Daphne, a landscape architect, when she applied for a job. Bart then sold his firm and began prowling Napa in search of a great vineyard. “How do you make a small fortune in the wine business?” goes a joke that has a predictable punch line: “You start with a large one.” The Araujo narrative is in many ways the archetypal Napa story of a successful entrepreneur who brings his fortune and his business acumen to bear on a second career producing wine with his name on it. The birth of Araujo vineyards coincided with the creation of the so-called cult Cabernets like Harlan, Colgin, and Bryant Family, wines made in small quantities (two thousand cases or fewer) in a richer, riper style than the old-guard Napa Cabs. But Bart and Daphne’s story is unique, due to the history of the vineyard they purchased and their hands-on, fanatical devotion to every detail of grape growing and wine making; whenever I call Bart, he seems to be in the vineyard. “After we purchased the property, I sat down and tasted the wines made from these grapes over the years,” Bart told me, “including the 1971 Ridge Eisele Vineyard made by Paul Draper, the ’74 Conn Creek bottling, and the ’75 Joseph Phelps. Whoever made the wine, there was this signature earthy mineral element that seemed to come through.”