Today we are going to talk about a world-renowned Italian wine – Barolo. Wine lovers must be familiar with this wine. At the end of the last century and the beginning of this century, it became famous in the New World, especially in North America. After politicians and celebrities are used to tasting French wines, they are all in high demand for this unexpected Italian wine.
Barolo – a city
The name Barolo comes from a small city in the Piedmont (Piemonte, Piedmont) region in northwestern Italy bordering France. Expanding around the small town of Barolo, there is a larger area called Langhe (Langge), which means “hills that change with the seasons” in the local dialect.
Langhe belongs to the hilly area, but it was a vast ocean a long time ago, so the soil is composed of blue-white marl and sandstone deposits, which is especially suitable for growing grapes. It is also because the soil is soft and easy to be washed by rain, so in order to prevent soil loss, grapes in the Langhe area are planted perpendicular to the slope of the hill. General agricultural machinery is difficult to enter because the slope is too large, and planting and picking are all done by hand. host.
In the early morning of the harvest season, the mountains are always shrouded in mist, so a grape produced in Langhe is named “Nebbiolo”. Barolo is made from 100% smoky grapes.
In such a vast area, why is it only called Barolo?
Because behind every beautiful story there is a beautiful woman!
In the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a Marquis of Barolo named Giulia Colbert Falletti, originally a French aristocrat, who later married to Italy and was a famous philanthropist in history. There are many schools and hospitals.
Although the French winemaking technology was taught by the ancient Romans, they did deliberate carefully and preserved this tradition for generations. Therefore, when the Marquise married to Italy, she decided to use local materials, and teamed up with General Staglieno, the “No. 1 imperial wine maker”, to brew a fragrant wine with misty grapes.
There is such a record in the history books: King Carlo Abbott wanted to taste the “new wine” made by her, so the Marquis presented 325 Carrà of wine to the king, so that the king would spend every day of the year when he was not fasting. All can enjoy 1 Carrà of fine wine.
This story is a miracle in the history of the Italian royal family, because Carrà is a wooden barrel pulled by a carriage. The capacity of each wooden barrel, converted into the current unit of measurement, is nearly 600 liters! ! !
Of course, the king himself could not drink so much wine, so he presented these wines as a royal gift from the Savoia family to European royal families. Barolo wine is also famous in Europe because of this heroic Marquis.
But few kings are not greedy. In order to always have good wine to drink, Carlo Albert bought a garden not far from the Marquise’s home and started to make wine by himself. Later, it was passed down from generation to generation. The sideline of the Savoy family. It can be seen that the Italians really love wine.
Traditional Barolo needs to be aged in large wooden barrels for several years, even decades, then bottled or filled in wooden barrels, and then shipped to various parts of Europe. The two kings of the last Italian dynasty, the Savoy (Savoia) family, Carlo Albert and Vittorio Emanuele II, both built their own wineries in Langhe, such as Verduno Castle and Fontana fredda Cold Spring Mountain Villa .
In the Langhe, the hills near Italy’s former imperial capital (Turin), where, with the exception of a few royal nobles, the working people have been mired in poverty. Every family guards their own land, grows grapes, raises cattle and sheep, and works hard to support their lives.
Families with the conditions to make wine will traditionally put grapes into huge wooden barrels for brewing. These large wooden barrels made of chestnut wood are passed down from generation to generation and are often the largest property of a family. The wine is placed in it, and it is brewed for more than ten years or decades.
Farmers who do not have the conditions to make wine can only sell grapes to middlemen. In the entire Langhe area, there were only five or six middlemen in the 1960s and 1970s. They would send people to pick grapes from farmers’ fields during the harvest season and resell them at high prices. To France not far away. And farmers often have to wait until next spring to receive money for selling grapes. For this bitter history, the people of Langhe still cry when they talk about it.
This situation continued until the early 1980s. At that time, the tense political situation in the world was eased, the European economy recovered, the Italian national team won the World Cup, and the whole country celebrated. The handsome Berlusconi created the first private TV station. leap. More and more young people are beginning to crave new ideas from the outside world.
The same goes for the young men of Langhe.
Barolo – a gang of wayward young men
In the 1980s and 1990s, a group of wayward young people appeared, who wanted to break the tradition of their ancestors and vowed to make the most delicious wine in the world. They were the “Barolo Boys”.
There is such a story in Langhe. There was a young guy named Eliu, who drove his Fiat all the way from Italy to Burgundy, France, to make a “pilgrimage” to this wine temple. Because he had no money to stay in a hotel, he could only sleep in the car every day. When he arrived in Burgundy, he walked into a winery with great excitement, and saw the owner of the winery coming out with his luggage, so he went up to the owner of the winery and said, “Hello, my name is Eleu , from Barolo, Italy, the family is brewing wine, I’m here to try your wine.”
The winery owner put the luggage in the back of his Porsche and replied, “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m just going out and going on vacation to the sea!”
Ailiu stood there blankly for a long time: as a wine grower, he could only sleep curled up in his car, while a French wine grower had a Porsche, a sailboat, and vacations. The same wine, Barolo can only be sold in bulk, even if it is bottled, a bottle can only sell for more than 1,000 lire (equivalent to about one euro later), but any bottle of wine from Burgundy is Ten times or even dozens of times the price of Barolo. “Why are the French better than us?!”
After returning to Italy, he called on a group of peers who had vineyards at home and began to study French winemaking methods. They found that the French pay special attention to the quality of grapes: Burgundy has a high latitude, and the sunlight is not so sufficient throughout the year, so sugar and aroma factors cannot accumulate enough during the ripening period of the grapes. Therefore, the French will cut off part of the grapes from the branches before they are ripe, so that the only sugar can be concentrated on a few bunches of grapes.
In other words, the number of leaves on each grape is fixed, and the nutrients produced by photosynthesis are limited every day. These nutrients need to be distributed to all the grapes on the branch. The smaller the denominator, the more nutrients each grape can get . Either you die or I die, it is like a palace fighting drama, or you can see it as a story of the Macau gambling king and his wife fighting for inheritance.
Therefore, in the cultivation of grapes, quality and quantity can never be balanced. In the impoverished Langhe, wine growers naturally would not waste a single grape, so these young people can only sneak around at night to pick and cut some unripe grapes in their own fields and throw them away. Of course, this has met with extreme resistance from the older generation, who think it is a blasphemy against hard work. Some older helpers even threw the scissors in front of them and never set foot in the vineyard again.
But that wasn’t the hardest step in their creative journey. When they sawed off their big barrels and made wine in French oak barrels, some people were disinherited because their father thought they were crazy.
Why abandon the large wooden barrels of the ancestors and switch to new, well-sized oak barrels? Some professional knowledge of wine making is involved here, so try to explain it in plain language:
Everyone knows that there is something called tannin in red wine, which is actually a preservative produced by the grape itself, which exists in the grape skin (to protect itself) and in the grape seeds (to protect the next generation). During the winemaking process, tannins are incorporated into the wine.
At the beginning, it was relatively lonely (small molecular chain), and liked to hook up with the receptors on our oral mucosa, producing a familiar astringent taste (if you don’t know this taste, go eat a raw persimmon or a raw banana to understand) . After a certain period of “micro-oxidation”, the tannins will hold hands and disdain to hook up with the receptors on the oral mucosa. As more and more tannins successfully group together, the astringent taste will gradually fade. The red wine is also mellow.
So where is the best place for “micro-oxidation”? Good sized new wooden barrel! The tiny pores in the wood itself allow oxygen to pass through, but as sediment builds up in the wine, these pores become plugged, turning the barrel into a sealed tank from which oxygen can no longer enter or exit. The reason for the moderate size is to allow the wine to contact the wall of the barrel as much as possible.
At the end of the day, I just want to tell you that those big wooden barrels that have been used for decades are not the best containers for wine making. So the young men saw them off to make room in the cellar for the barrels (Barrique).
In 1983, these young people secretly moved oak barrels into the wine cellar for the first time, and covered them with a large black cloth to prevent others from finding out. They are looking forward to, hoping that the different fragrances wafting from these oak barrels will allow them to prove that their efforts will be rewarded.
methanol incident
But just in the past few years, the most tragic event in the history of Italian wine occurred – the methanol incident, and many people lost their lives.
1986 was a tragic year in the history of Italian wine. In that year, more than 20 people were poisoned and died because of drinking wine blended with methanol, and more people lost their eyesight as a result. Wine exports fell by 37% compared with the previous year. The largest customer, Germany, detained all wines from Italy at the customs, and were not allowed to enter the market without inspection.
Many people think that Italian wine will be in a slump, but the young people in Langhe see this as an opportunity, because consumers have never paid so much attention to the quality of wine, and quality is their advantage.
They organized a small team to meet every week to share their experiences and learn from each other. Someone said: “If I can experience 50 grape harvests in my life, then 10 of us will have 500. As long as we are united, we can make the most delicious wine in the world!”
Barolo – a symbol of the Italian way of life
Sure enough, the “new version of Barolo” they brewed met Bole, an Italian-American guy named Marc De Grazia. Perhaps because of their similar age, Marc quickly found a tacit understanding with this group of young people.
Newborn calves are not afraid of tigers, and Marc has opened up a world for Barolo in the United States. As a student of classical literature, he never imagined that he could make a group of people and even rewrite the history of Italian wine.
From the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s, there were two major immigrations in Italy, and more than 5 million Italians left their homes and came to the United States. So as long as Mafia is mentioned, there is no need to explain the meaning at all; here, there is a place called “Little Italy” in every big city, and Italian culture is also deeply rooted in the United States.
Just as foreigners always ask for spring rolls, moo shu meat and hot and sour soup every time they go to a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, the Italian food in the last century is Pizza, Spaghetti, Meatballs and Chianti in the eyes of Americans. The appearance of Barolo is like a spring breeze. It is not only a mellow wine comparable to French wine, but also drives the improvement of the quality of the entire Italian cuisine. The mainstream media scrambled to report that all of a sudden, politicians and celebrities flocked to Italian restaurants, and being able to taste Barolo was the best material for bragging at that time. This frenzy has continued, from the United States to Asia, and now there is an Italian restaurant named after Barolo in Beijing. Barolo became another symbol of the Italian way of life after Spaghetti.
The protagonists of this frenzy were of course also invited to America, perhaps unaware of the sensation they were causing at the time. This group of young people who had never traveled far packed their bags and flew across the Atlantic Ocean, and they couldn’t speak 50 English words together. But the flowers and hugs everywhere they go are the best proof of success.
From then on they got a name – Barolo Boys.
“In the past ten years, the people of Langhe have seen money that they have not seen in the previous century!” An old man in Langhe said.
Another said: “The Barolo brewed by these people violates the traditions of generations of Langhe and does not deserve to be called Barolo at all.”
As a result, the war among Langhe’s wineries started. Conservative wineries insisted on adhering to the tradition and continuing to brew with ancient methods. The young radicals confronted the conservatives and fought with each other: everyone wanted to be the first, and everyone wanted to be the most famous.
The wine continued to be brewed, but the Barolo Boys’ parties were no longer there, and the spirit of unity and struggle in a crisis was no longer there. At this time, people also discovered that the taste of Barolo’s oak barrels gradually overwhelmed the taste that Nebbio grapes should have…
“Are they wrong? No! If it weren’t for them, Barolo wouldn’t be where he is today.”
“Are they right? And no! Because everything has its due.”
Sometimes I can’t help but ask: “What is innovation? What is tradition? Does innovation become tradition when it succeeds? Will those who have innovated before become obstacles to the next batch of innovators?”
