Ben Hunting
Ben Hunting
Notes from visiting some winemakers and restaurants in the Piemonte and Emilia-Romagna on a recent trip.
Burlotto
My wife and I tasted here and stayed at the lovely Burlotto agriturismo, Locanda dell'Orso Bevitore, down the street in Verduno from the cantina. The name of the agriturismo seems to originate from an old illustration they have of a polar bear drinking their Barolo, brought on a famous expedition to the North Pole. Fabio Alessandria's sister Cristina is in charge of the agriturismo and was very kind to us when our rental car broke down.
I was surprised by how few fermentation vats there were. Fabio Alessandria said that the harvesting of the different grapes one after the other means they can cycle through the fermentations and finish with the Nebbiolo. There is no destemming for the Monvigliero Barolo. The fermentations for the different Baroli are traditional, the one more modern-seeming element being that the temperature is controlled, if necessary, by a radiator-like refrigeration tube that's dropped into the vat. (I believe Giuseppe Rinaldi said they now use the same contraption.) The Barbera is aged in any of the cellar's new barrels in their first vintage as Barbera manages the oak better. Alessandria said that each barrel is unique in its attributes so starting with Barbera also allows him to gain a sense of a barrel. Some barrels will be good enough to last a long time without needing to be replaced and others won't. The Barolo ages first on the higher floor of the cellar, before being racked to the lower floor, where the temperature is more stable.
We couldn't visit the vineyards with Alessandria, something that was generally difficult to do with any producer. We tasted the 2010 Monvigliero and Acclivi Barolo, quantities of which are about equal for that vintage. I could be wrong but I had the sense that Alessandria values the Acclivi just as highly as the more famous Monvigliero. Alessandria prefers to drink Barolo at 10 years old, although he added that his palate is clearly influenced by drinking so much Barolo young in the cantina. His cousins have the last name Burlotto and own the Castello di Verduno. When we mentioned to locals that we were staying at the Burlotto agriturismo, they usually got confused between the families. The G.B. Burlotto wines still seemed to be under the radar in the Piemonte. A Pelaverga festival was about to take place in Verduno the weekend after we left.
Canonica
We also stayed at Giovanni Canonica's agriturismo in Barolo, Il Quarto Stato. There are some excellent hiking/walking trails in the area, the "Sentieri di Langa e Barolo", and on our first day we took one that starts near the agriturismo, walking from Barolo to Monforte d'Alba and back, between vines and through some woods. Doing this hike, and getting a little lost, gave us an intimate appreciation of the steepness of some of the vineyards.
Canonica was the only producer who showed us his vineyard in person. He and his wife are very warm people. For a long time - I think he said two hundred years - his family, including his father, were the butchers in Barolo. His father specialized in meat from a breed of cow that is very small - not Fassone - with excellent flavor, now quite rare. There is a butcher's shop next to the house and cellar still. Canonica's Paiagallo vineyard is stunningly alive, with a thick carpet of grass, in stark comparison to the scorched earth of the vineyards we had traversed on our hike. He showed us how many of the vines had been damaged by hail this year. I asked him if he had planted any of the plants that were thriving there between the vines (for a purpose, à la CRB) but they all grow wild. He said the common practice in the Piemonte of planting roses at the end of the rows is now just a tradition but that roses were once thought to act as a canary in the coal mine for oidium disease. He will eventually be taking out his Barbera vines in Paiagallo and planting Nebbiolo instead. There are no Dolcetto vines. The owners of the neighboring vineyards. Fontanafredda and someone else, have shifted to more organic practices, which he said was the direction the market was heading. Canonica's new vineyard in Grinzane Cavour belonged to his father-in-law but was not being farmed in a sustainable manner until Canonica took it over. The wine from Grinzane Cavour will be bottled separately for the moment, although he may eventually make a blend of the Paiagallo and Grinzane Cavour in future vintages.
These days, he generally harvests his Barbera and Nebbiolo in the same week. Barbera produces a lot more juice, he said, and ferments faster and more easily. During fermentation, the Nebbiolo's cap of skins is punched down every 2 or 3 days, the one element of technique that seemed to vary a lot from producer to producer. In his tiny cellar, the Barolo is put in the botti downstairs at first and then later shifted upstairs to fiberglass tanks, where the 2011 Barolo was now. A quirk was that we didn't actually get to taste his 2010 Barolo with him, nor his Barbera. Canonica likes to drink his Barolo at around ten years of age. He also grows delicious hazelnuts.
We talked in a mixture of French, Italian and English (as our Italian is very limited) so there were some miscommunications: at one point, in his cellar, he mentioned how he had been born in the house, one of the last people locally not to be born in a hospital. I then told him his cellar "smelled great" but he thought I was talking about home births being a good thing and hastened to tell me that in certain circumstances, as for example with his daughter's birth, a hospital was necessary. He has a sweet, small dog, who is deaf but has an excellent sense of smell. Unfortunately, the dog does not like the taste of truffles, a prerequisite for hunting them.
Bartolo Mascarello
Maria-Teresa Mascarello was in charge of our tasting and tour, with two other couples, and was a wonderful communicator, fizzing with energy and warmth. She was happy to talk about how she liked to drink her wines. We tasted the 2013 Dolcetto, the 2012 Barbera and the 2012 Freisa. She likes to drink the Dolcetto two years after the vintage and the Langhe Nebbiolo at a similar age, the Freisa young also. (The Freisa is racked over the Nebbiolo must and she said they are the only producer to use this method for Freisa.) The American couple tasting with us were baffled by Dolcetto and Freisa. Maria-Teresa amusingly (and sincerely) recommended the Freisa to them as a wine "for hamburgers".
The bottle of the 2010 Barolo we tasted had been open for 4 days and perhaps as a result it was the most accessible Barolo tasted at a producer during the trip. Mascarello thought the 2000, 2005, and 2007 vintages of the B. Mascarello Barolo were drinking well now but that many other vintages, including 2010, needed around 20 years of aging.
We talked about Cannubi politics and about the new vineyard labelling rules. No vineyards are listed on their 2010 Barolo label. They do not deliberately separately ferment and vinify the grapes from their various vineyards for the Barolo, although the differing ripening times mean this does happen to some degree. They ferment in concrete but have now installed some wooden tine for the Langhe Nebbiolo as they were running out of fermentation space. Like Canonica, she said the harvests of the Barbera and Nebbiolo grapes are drawing closer to each other than they used to be. She was surprised to hear that we had bought Dolcetto grapes to eat at the Mercato dei Contadini as hers were not ripe yet.
This was the most artistic cantina we visited, as Levi Dalton's blog amply documents. A large glass urn on the table we sat at held a tangle of ivy. To open a bottle, Mascarello used a lever device on the wall, found at a flea market.
Although she wasn't able to show us her vineyards, Mascarello did very kindly mark them on Masnaghetti maps for us so that we could visit them ourselves, explaining that we would be able to recognise her vines because they had recently been sprayed blue with copper sulfate, as well as by various other landmarks. So we made a self-guided walk in her vines in Rocche dell'Annunziata (probably the most beautiful situation), Cannubi (with a long row of roses planted above her hut), Cannubi San Lorenzo, and Monrobiolo della Bussia (more off the beaten path, where she has Dolcetto vines). Once again, these were steep vineyards. I hadn't expected the earth in the Piemonte to be quite so pale and crumbly, making it easy to slip down the hill even in hiking boots.
Cappellano
We were guided around by Paolo, an assistant to Augusto Cappellano who also works at Podere Le Boncie. Here we were particularly struck by the extremely considered, almost experimental (without being modern) approach to the winemaking, with many different-sized vessels in different materials (concrete, stainless steel, both Stockinger and Garbellotto botti). There didn't seem to be a standard procedure for the winemaking. The fermentation and vinification is handled differently for each vessel, different areas of the vineyard being vinified separately before finally being blended together. The wine is also racked between different types of vessel over time.
So, for example, we tasted the 2013 Barolo Rupestris from two different botti, a Stockinger and Garbellotto, from two different areas of the vineyard. There was a considerable difference between them, one wine being far less tannic and fresher-tasting than the other. Paolo thought the wine from the fresher barrel tasted more elegant but would need the backbone that the wine from the other barrel would provide, once they were blended, in order to age well. We saw and tasted from the single barrel of 2013 Pie Franco. Paolo said the Pie Franco vines are in the middle of the vineyard, with the other Nebbiolo vines growing around them, and that there doesn't need to be as rigorous destemming with the Pie Franco as the stems on those vines ripen better. We also tasted a new Barbera from their Novello vineyard, from the 2013 vintage, that was about to be bottled young, unlike their Gabutti Barbera.
Paolo was generous with his time and thoughts. He said that many Dolcetto and Barbera growers are now grappling with disease in their vines. Apparently, at the time when Dolcetto was very popular, the vines were planted on the higher parts of the vineyards throughout the lower Langhe. Now Nebbiolo vines have taken their place. When we asked him why it was hard to find good Dolcetto on local restaurant wine lists, he said that locally people think Dolcetto should be cheap. The 2010 Barolo was still aging in bottle before going on the market, the only producer we visited where this was the case. Paolo was adamant that he did not like to decant a Barolo of any age. He recommended the small producer Giulio Viglione.
Giuseppe Rinaldi
This was the least lengthy visit we made and less engrossing than the others but they were in the process of bottling and busy with that. The 2011 Barolo had already been bottled. The Brunate Barolo, which replaces the Brunate-Le Coste bottling because of the labelling rules, is still 15% Le Coste (as permitted) and the rest of Le Coste goes into the Tre Tine. Giuseppe Rinaldi's wife, who showed us around, said they like to drink the Freisa, Dolcetto and Ruche young, considerably sooner after bottling than Maria-Teresa Mascarello did, who recommended waiting at least 6 months. The Barbera we tasted was delicious, although we had to ask for it and weren't told the vintage. The tasting room was dotted with empty gift bottles from other producers, including a Tournelle Vin Jaune bottle. Mrs Rinaldi said she did not like Jura whites. There was a very old contraption for putting the corks in bottles, which she said had been used recently for the corks in the double magnums sent to the States.
For restaurants, the most memorable food of many excellent meals we had in the Piemonte was at Da Bardon, south-east of Asti. The wine list is impresssive and well-priced, with some older unlisted vintages available if you ask. We drunk a very good 2011 Giuseppe Rinaldi Freisa here. We also liked La Torre in Cherasco a lot. The list there mostly has newer vintages but included the 2007 Brovia Dolcetto Solatio. At an enoteca called La Vite Turchese in Barolo, we were served a refermenting bottle of 2011 Giuseppe Rinaldi Barbera, and treated badly about it, so I would watch out there.
The best wine list of the entire trip, as well as excellent food and a convivial atmosphere in a very scenic location, was at Locanda Mariella in Emilia-Romagna. The restaurant was recommended to us at Cappellano. There is a shorter list they give you with the menu, but also a separate, huge list that comes in a file with 6 binders inside it, one of which is devoted to non-Italian wines. The owner travels to the Jura twice a year and was just about to travel to the Roussillon. I haven't come across many better French lists than the French section of that binder, not to mention the other binder of Champagne and sparkling wines. The North Italian binder was also extraordinary. 2002 Ferrando Carema White Label for 18 euros.
Overall, a great trip! It was moving to be able to associate the wines we drink in New York with the dedicated and spirited people behind them, as well as the personalities their cantine exude.
Burlotto
My wife and I tasted here and stayed at the lovely Burlotto agriturismo, Locanda dell'Orso Bevitore, down the street in Verduno from the cantina. The name of the agriturismo seems to originate from an old illustration they have of a polar bear drinking their Barolo, brought on a famous expedition to the North Pole. Fabio Alessandria's sister Cristina is in charge of the agriturismo and was very kind to us when our rental car broke down.
I was surprised by how few fermentation vats there were. Fabio Alessandria said that the harvesting of the different grapes one after the other means they can cycle through the fermentations and finish with the Nebbiolo. There is no destemming for the Monvigliero Barolo. The fermentations for the different Baroli are traditional, the one more modern-seeming element being that the temperature is controlled, if necessary, by a radiator-like refrigeration tube that's dropped into the vat. (I believe Giuseppe Rinaldi said they now use the same contraption.) The Barbera is aged in any of the cellar's new barrels in their first vintage as Barbera manages the oak better. Alessandria said that each barrel is unique in its attributes so starting with Barbera also allows him to gain a sense of a barrel. Some barrels will be good enough to last a long time without needing to be replaced and others won't. The Barolo ages first on the higher floor of the cellar, before being racked to the lower floor, where the temperature is more stable.
We couldn't visit the vineyards with Alessandria, something that was generally difficult to do with any producer. We tasted the 2010 Monvigliero and Acclivi Barolo, quantities of which are about equal for that vintage. I could be wrong but I had the sense that Alessandria values the Acclivi just as highly as the more famous Monvigliero. Alessandria prefers to drink Barolo at 10 years old, although he added that his palate is clearly influenced by drinking so much Barolo young in the cantina. His cousins have the last name Burlotto and own the Castello di Verduno. When we mentioned to locals that we were staying at the Burlotto agriturismo, they usually got confused between the families. The G.B. Burlotto wines still seemed to be under the radar in the Piemonte. A Pelaverga festival was about to take place in Verduno the weekend after we left.
Canonica
We also stayed at Giovanni Canonica's agriturismo in Barolo, Il Quarto Stato. There are some excellent hiking/walking trails in the area, the "Sentieri di Langa e Barolo", and on our first day we took one that starts near the agriturismo, walking from Barolo to Monforte d'Alba and back, between vines and through some woods. Doing this hike, and getting a little lost, gave us an intimate appreciation of the steepness of some of the vineyards.
Canonica was the only producer who showed us his vineyard in person. He and his wife are very warm people. For a long time - I think he said two hundred years - his family, including his father, were the butchers in Barolo. His father specialized in meat from a breed of cow that is very small - not Fassone - with excellent flavor, now quite rare. There is a butcher's shop next to the house and cellar still. Canonica's Paiagallo vineyard is stunningly alive, with a thick carpet of grass, in stark comparison to the scorched earth of the vineyards we had traversed on our hike. He showed us how many of the vines had been damaged by hail this year. I asked him if he had planted any of the plants that were thriving there between the vines (for a purpose, à la CRB) but they all grow wild. He said the common practice in the Piemonte of planting roses at the end of the rows is now just a tradition but that roses were once thought to act as a canary in the coal mine for oidium disease. He will eventually be taking out his Barbera vines in Paiagallo and planting Nebbiolo instead. There are no Dolcetto vines. The owners of the neighboring vineyards. Fontanafredda and someone else, have shifted to more organic practices, which he said was the direction the market was heading. Canonica's new vineyard in Grinzane Cavour belonged to his father-in-law but was not being farmed in a sustainable manner until Canonica took it over. The wine from Grinzane Cavour will be bottled separately for the moment, although he may eventually make a blend of the Paiagallo and Grinzane Cavour in future vintages.
These days, he generally harvests his Barbera and Nebbiolo in the same week. Barbera produces a lot more juice, he said, and ferments faster and more easily. During fermentation, the Nebbiolo's cap of skins is punched down every 2 or 3 days, the one element of technique that seemed to vary a lot from producer to producer. In his tiny cellar, the Barolo is put in the botti downstairs at first and then later shifted upstairs to fiberglass tanks, where the 2011 Barolo was now. A quirk was that we didn't actually get to taste his 2010 Barolo with him, nor his Barbera. Canonica likes to drink his Barolo at around ten years of age. He also grows delicious hazelnuts.
We talked in a mixture of French, Italian and English (as our Italian is very limited) so there were some miscommunications: at one point, in his cellar, he mentioned how he had been born in the house, one of the last people locally not to be born in a hospital. I then told him his cellar "smelled great" but he thought I was talking about home births being a good thing and hastened to tell me that in certain circumstances, as for example with his daughter's birth, a hospital was necessary. He has a sweet, small dog, who is deaf but has an excellent sense of smell. Unfortunately, the dog does not like the taste of truffles, a prerequisite for hunting them.
Bartolo Mascarello
Maria-Teresa Mascarello was in charge of our tasting and tour, with two other couples, and was a wonderful communicator, fizzing with energy and warmth. She was happy to talk about how she liked to drink her wines. We tasted the 2013 Dolcetto, the 2012 Barbera and the 2012 Freisa. She likes to drink the Dolcetto two years after the vintage and the Langhe Nebbiolo at a similar age, the Freisa young also. (The Freisa is racked over the Nebbiolo must and she said they are the only producer to use this method for Freisa.) The American couple tasting with us were baffled by Dolcetto and Freisa. Maria-Teresa amusingly (and sincerely) recommended the Freisa to them as a wine "for hamburgers".
The bottle of the 2010 Barolo we tasted had been open for 4 days and perhaps as a result it was the most accessible Barolo tasted at a producer during the trip. Mascarello thought the 2000, 2005, and 2007 vintages of the B. Mascarello Barolo were drinking well now but that many other vintages, including 2010, needed around 20 years of aging.
We talked about Cannubi politics and about the new vineyard labelling rules. No vineyards are listed on their 2010 Barolo label. They do not deliberately separately ferment and vinify the grapes from their various vineyards for the Barolo, although the differing ripening times mean this does happen to some degree. They ferment in concrete but have now installed some wooden tine for the Langhe Nebbiolo as they were running out of fermentation space. Like Canonica, she said the harvests of the Barbera and Nebbiolo grapes are drawing closer to each other than they used to be. She was surprised to hear that we had bought Dolcetto grapes to eat at the Mercato dei Contadini as hers were not ripe yet.
This was the most artistic cantina we visited, as Levi Dalton's blog amply documents. A large glass urn on the table we sat at held a tangle of ivy. To open a bottle, Mascarello used a lever device on the wall, found at a flea market.
Although she wasn't able to show us her vineyards, Mascarello did very kindly mark them on Masnaghetti maps for us so that we could visit them ourselves, explaining that we would be able to recognise her vines because they had recently been sprayed blue with copper sulfate, as well as by various other landmarks. So we made a self-guided walk in her vines in Rocche dell'Annunziata (probably the most beautiful situation), Cannubi (with a long row of roses planted above her hut), Cannubi San Lorenzo, and Monrobiolo della Bussia (more off the beaten path, where she has Dolcetto vines). Once again, these were steep vineyards. I hadn't expected the earth in the Piemonte to be quite so pale and crumbly, making it easy to slip down the hill even in hiking boots.
Cappellano
We were guided around by Paolo, an assistant to Augusto Cappellano who also works at Podere Le Boncie. Here we were particularly struck by the extremely considered, almost experimental (without being modern) approach to the winemaking, with many different-sized vessels in different materials (concrete, stainless steel, both Stockinger and Garbellotto botti). There didn't seem to be a standard procedure for the winemaking. The fermentation and vinification is handled differently for each vessel, different areas of the vineyard being vinified separately before finally being blended together. The wine is also racked between different types of vessel over time.
So, for example, we tasted the 2013 Barolo Rupestris from two different botti, a Stockinger and Garbellotto, from two different areas of the vineyard. There was a considerable difference between them, one wine being far less tannic and fresher-tasting than the other. Paolo thought the wine from the fresher barrel tasted more elegant but would need the backbone that the wine from the other barrel would provide, once they were blended, in order to age well. We saw and tasted from the single barrel of 2013 Pie Franco. Paolo said the Pie Franco vines are in the middle of the vineyard, with the other Nebbiolo vines growing around them, and that there doesn't need to be as rigorous destemming with the Pie Franco as the stems on those vines ripen better. We also tasted a new Barbera from their Novello vineyard, from the 2013 vintage, that was about to be bottled young, unlike their Gabutti Barbera.
Paolo was generous with his time and thoughts. He said that many Dolcetto and Barbera growers are now grappling with disease in their vines. Apparently, at the time when Dolcetto was very popular, the vines were planted on the higher parts of the vineyards throughout the lower Langhe. Now Nebbiolo vines have taken their place. When we asked him why it was hard to find good Dolcetto on local restaurant wine lists, he said that locally people think Dolcetto should be cheap. The 2010 Barolo was still aging in bottle before going on the market, the only producer we visited where this was the case. Paolo was adamant that he did not like to decant a Barolo of any age. He recommended the small producer Giulio Viglione.
Giuseppe Rinaldi
This was the least lengthy visit we made and less engrossing than the others but they were in the process of bottling and busy with that. The 2011 Barolo had already been bottled. The Brunate Barolo, which replaces the Brunate-Le Coste bottling because of the labelling rules, is still 15% Le Coste (as permitted) and the rest of Le Coste goes into the Tre Tine. Giuseppe Rinaldi's wife, who showed us around, said they like to drink the Freisa, Dolcetto and Ruche young, considerably sooner after bottling than Maria-Teresa Mascarello did, who recommended waiting at least 6 months. The Barbera we tasted was delicious, although we had to ask for it and weren't told the vintage. The tasting room was dotted with empty gift bottles from other producers, including a Tournelle Vin Jaune bottle. Mrs Rinaldi said she did not like Jura whites. There was a very old contraption for putting the corks in bottles, which she said had been used recently for the corks in the double magnums sent to the States.
For restaurants, the most memorable food of many excellent meals we had in the Piemonte was at Da Bardon, south-east of Asti. The wine list is impresssive and well-priced, with some older unlisted vintages available if you ask. We drunk a very good 2011 Giuseppe Rinaldi Freisa here. We also liked La Torre in Cherasco a lot. The list there mostly has newer vintages but included the 2007 Brovia Dolcetto Solatio. At an enoteca called La Vite Turchese in Barolo, we were served a refermenting bottle of 2011 Giuseppe Rinaldi Barbera, and treated badly about it, so I would watch out there.
The best wine list of the entire trip, as well as excellent food and a convivial atmosphere in a very scenic location, was at Locanda Mariella in Emilia-Romagna. The restaurant was recommended to us at Cappellano. There is a shorter list they give you with the menu, but also a separate, huge list that comes in a file with 6 binders inside it, one of which is devoted to non-Italian wines. The owner travels to the Jura twice a year and was just about to travel to the Roussillon. I haven't come across many better French lists than the French section of that binder, not to mention the other binder of Champagne and sparkling wines. The North Italian binder was also extraordinary. 2002 Ferrando Carema White Label for 18 euros.
Overall, a great trip! It was moving to be able to associate the wines we drink in New York with the dedicated and spirited people behind them, as well as the personalities their cantine exude.
