Region: Piemont
Grapes: Organic 80% Arneis and 20% Moscato
Vinification: Orange wine. 30 days skin contact in acacia wood barrels. No sulfur. Natural.
Tasting: Highly aromatic white flowers, peach skin, honeysuckle and mango. Cutting the fruit is an intense essential oil – oregano and ylang ylang savoury. Beautiful. Full body, dry tannins, and the fruit and herb balance continues on the palate.
Région: Piemonte
Grape: Arneis
Vinification: fermentation on skins. Organic.
Dégustation: high toned green pineapple and ripe mango purée nose. Some warm spices, maybe saffron. Lean palate, light tannin but beautifully integrated.
A nice light orange with lots of juicy ripe fruit for the holidays.
Pairings:
Samke Harra
Tatar Borek
Bamia
Shish Taouk
Kibbe
Jibne
Shrimp
Region: Langhe (basically white Barbaresco).
Grapes: Chardonnay with a bit of Nebbiolo.
Vinification: Organic grapes fermented in large oak vats with indigenous yeasts.
Tasting: Really amazing Chardonnay. Good lord. Not too much to say. Oak influence is subtle and well integrated. The wine remains fresh and zippy and mineral but with a browning butter backend to support it. Complex, lovely fruit.
This is from the same vineyards as Roagna’s Dolcetto.
Region: Piemonte
SubRegion/Appellation: Langhe Nebbiolo
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Grapes: Organic Nebbiolo
Vinification: One year in large old barrels.
Tasting: Classic Nebbiolo on the nose. Subdued, earthy, full of rose and violet. Palate is broad, medium bodied, with tight dry tannins and a well integrated fresh acidity.
Region: Piemonte
Grape: Cortese, Favorita, Sauvignon Blanc and Vermentino. Field blend (co-plantation).
Vinification: Organic since 1964! Co-fermentation of all the grapes with wild yeasts. Aged on Lee’s for a year in concrete. A tiny amount of sugar added to the bottle to begin a light secondary fermentation: hence the slight effervescence.
Tasting: Very odd white. It shows slight effervescence, the perfect apéro. Nose of tropical pear, wild berries, some fresh grassy action, and a hint of yeasty brioche from the lees. Palate is fresh and tropical with a slight sweetness cut through by the effervescence. COOL WINE.
Region: Piemonte
Grape: Barbera
Vinification: 30 days of fermentation/maceration on skins followed by 8 months of aging, all in stainless steel.
Tasting: Italian table wine. Light nose of ripe and slightly oxidized red fruit, some drying flower petals. Same on the palate which is medium body, medium acidity, low tannin. Very typical table wine. Just fine. Not much else to say.
This comes from Piemonte, the same region as Barolo and Barbaresco. While Nebbiolo is the noble grape used for big, bombastic, full body wines to drink with meats, Barbera (along with Dolcetto) makes for a lighter, easier, more drinkable everyday vino de tavola (vin de table). Some producers, of course, make amazingly complex Barbera and Dolcetto (we have some from Rinaldi and Sandri, for example), but the vast majority are quite like this little Tullio: nothing special, but just fine for a chin-chin.
Region: Langhe
Grape: Nebbiolo
Sub-Region: Barolo del Commune di Serralunga d’Alba.
Notice Serralunga, a sub-region of Barolo, in the South-east. Wines from Serralunga are known for powerful, rich wines. This particular cuvée comes from relatively young vines, so it results in a relatively light Serralunga. Lots of freshness.
Vinification: Organic in the vineyard. Long spontaneous fermentation on skins with wild yeast. 24 months aging in traditional large oak botti.
Tasting: Underripe red fruit, tart cherries and cranberry with a hint of burnt orange peel and dried herbs on the nose (old fashioned?). That is the classic mineral/charcoal element. Palate is high in tannin, high in acidity, but relatively light in body (there is nothing heavy about this wine. Call it medium with high tannin). Chocolate covered cranberries and orange again. Some leather, black pepper, dried herbs in the tertiary.
Nebbiolo is unquestionably one of the greatest and most complex grape varietals. It’s home is the town of Langhe: the Northwest corner of Italy.
Barolo is the King of Nebbiolo. The queen is nearby Barbaresco (Sorry for the gender normativity… It is a more elegant but lighter version of Nebbiolo). See how the two regions surround the town of Alba, which also happens to be the capital of Truffles in Italy.
Nebbiolo is a grape that is, by nature, difficult. It is high in tannin, high in acidity, and ripens late. As a result, Barolos and Barbarescos are naturally difficult to drink in their youth: extremely tight and high in both tannin and acidity. Until the 1980s, the thought of drinking a Barolo under 10 years of age was laughed at. Moreover, as was the case in Champagne, large houses dominated the commercial market and growers were left alienated both in terms of production and economics – a difficult situation for the poor farmer in post-WWII Italy.
The mid-1970s were a turning point in Barolo history. As in the rest of the Western world, young men and women who came of age in Italy in the late 1960s and early 1970s began questioning the status quo, and in the Langhe, this meant questioning the staunchly patriarchal society that for generations had accepted what essentially amounted to a class division that penalized the contadini, the farmers and growers who were the lowest rung on the country’s social ladder whether they owned land or not…
By the early 1980s, botti, large casks made of Slavonian oak, had become the main point of contention among the new generation of growers-turned producers who wanted to completely overhaul winemaking in the area. Their reasoning was that what they considered the greatest wines in the world, and those that received the most admiration from critics around the world—namely, Bordeaux and Burgundy as well as cult offerings from Napa Valley—were aged in barriques: 225-liter (or, as in Burgundy, 228-liter) barrels made of French oak. Altare and a growing contingent of other Langhe vintners increasingly despised the leaking, oft en rancid barrels that were passed down through the families. In 1983, Altare took matters into his own hands.Th at year, tensions between Altare and his father reached an explosive point. Just two years earlier, Elio had spent weeks in the hospital as a result of chemical poisoning from products his father used on the crops, especially on the fruit trees.
“After he sprayed the fruit trees again that year, I went out and bought a chainsaw and cut them all down. While I was at, I decided it was time to eliminate the old barrels, and cut them to pieces with the chainsaw,” says Elio, whose infuriated father promptly disinherited him.
Undeterred, in 1984, Elio, who was by now renting the cellars and vineyards from his family, purchased his first barriques.
- Kerin O’Keefe, Barolo and Barbaresco (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014), 45-46.
While one must admire such a revolutionary spirit, the revolution spun a bit too far backwards. Yes, things went well for Barolo. Yes, the peasants made some cash. But in doing so, they lost much of their identity. Barolo’s through the 1990s and early 2000s became nearly indistinguishable from California and Bordeaux (since it was indeed those regions Altare set out to imitate). These small, new oak barrels impart flavors of chocolate, vanilla, and cigar-box that have nothing to do with terroir, grapes, or a winemaker. They appeal to the sweet-tooth, not the wine lover.
As is typically the case with revolutions, it suffered an equal and opposite reaction. Those who followed Altare were labelled Modernists while a group of principled winemakers led by Bartolo Mascarello, Beppe Rinaldi, and Teobaldo Cappellano pushed back against the Californication of Bordeaux and became known as the Traditionalists. By no means conservative in any political sense, they believed in what Barolo could be apart from Californication.
Traditionalists argued that excessive grape thinning, short, violent fermentations in rotary fermenters, sorting tables and barriques destroy Barolo’s and Barbaresco’s unique characteristics of leather, tar, and rose, replacing the latter with espresso, chocolate, and vanilla notes, while Nebbiolo’s nervous acidity and bracing tannins were exchanged for extracted but enervated wines with lower acidity and bitter wood tannins that don’t soften with time as do Nebbiolo’s innate tannins. While the “Modernists” wanted power and concentration, the “Traditionalists” desired complexity, and most of the latter strived for elegance over raw muscle.
- O’Keefe, Barolo and Barbaresco, 48.
Ferdinando Principiano is a wonderful case study in the history of Barolo, a region fraught with controversy. He began, in the early 1990s, in the Altare modernist camp. However, he ended up hating his own wines!
Au départ, Ferdinando a été séduit par l’appel moderne… Mais… il a fini par détester ses vins.
He turned to natural winemaking in the new millennium, and joined the traditionalist camp by rejecting new barriques and over-extraction.
He now allows his Barolo to ferment spontaneously, in traditional large oak botti, and the result is free from vanilla’d oak. The fruit is fresh, tart, and the great minerality of Nebbiolo is allowed to shine.
Damas Wine 