More Than a Bargain Barolo

The hills around Alba are planted with Nebbiolo the way other places are planted with wheat, row after row climbing the slopes, and from a distance you cannot tell which vines will become Barolo and which will not.

Sometimes the answer depends on nothing more than which side of a boundary line a row happens to fall. The grapes do not know the difference. The price on the bottle certainly does.

A Barolo will cost you £30, often a good deal more. A Langhe Nebbiolo from the same hills, made by the same growers and occasionally from the same vineyards, costs around £15 to £20, or did when I wrote this. I went to Piemonte expecting the cheaper wine to be a sketch of the more famous one. I came home thinking it was a different kind of picture altogether, and in some ways a more honest one.

Nebbiolo has long lived in the shadow of its two great names, Barolo and Barbaresco. Even some of the people who grew it treated the rest of their Nebbiolo as an afterthought, something to sell young while the serious wine sat in barrel. That attitude is changing. The growers I met were making Langhe Nebbiolo with real care, and the wines showed it, with bright, joyful fruit and a clarity that made even the more solemn tasters around me break into a smile.

I tasted many of them at the Nebbiolo Nobile tasting in the castle of Serralunga d’Alba, which is the sort of setting that can flatter a wine. These wines did not need flattering. They had Nebbiolo’s finesse and its fine-grained tannins, but they were open and generous now, wines to drink with dinner rather than lay down for a grandchild. In a region with food this good, that is no small virtue. A plate of tajarin with butter and sage, a glass of young Nebbiolo, and the evening takes care of itself.

So here’s my advice, and it’s simple. When you are tempted by a Barolo, look instead for the word Nebbiolo on a Langhe label, and spend what you save on the meal. You will be drinking the same grape from the same soil, made by people who, increasingly, believe in it on its own terms.

Something is shifting in these hills, and I will be writing more about it in the posts to come.

Thanks to David Berry Green and Berry Bros & Rudd for making this trip possible.