The marquise
The past
Today we will talk about an Italian wine famous all over the world: Barolo . Wine lovers have certainly heard of it. At the end of the last century and the beginning of this century, it became famous overseas, especially in North America. After politicians and celebrities got used to tasting French wine, this unexpected Italian wine was highly sought after and appreciated.
Barolo – the city
The name of Barolo derives from a small town in the Piedmont region on the border with France, in the north-west of Italy. If, starting from the surroundings of the small town of Barolo, we move, there is a larger area called Langhe, which in the local dialect means “hills that change with the seasons”.
The Langhe belong to the hilly area, but long ago they were part of a vast ocean, so the soil is composed of blue-white marl and sandstone deposits, therefore particularly suitable for the cultivation of vines. Precisely because the soil is soft and easily eroded by rain, to avoid soil loss, the Langhe grapes are planted perpendicular to the slope of the hill. Generally, agricultural machinery is difficult to access due to the steep slope. Sowing and harvesting are mostly done by hand.
Every early morning, during the harvest season, the mountains are always shrouded in fog, which is why a grape produced in the Langhe is called “Nebbiolo”. Barolo is made 100% from Nebbiolo grapes.
But a wine from such a large territory, why is it called all Barolo? Behind every beautiful story there is a beautiful woman!
In the mid-nineteenth century, Barolo had a marquise named Giulia Colbert Falletti, originally a French noble, then married to an Italian, is remembered in history as a famous philanthropist, had many schools and hospitals built.
Although French winemaking techniques were taught to them by the ancient Romans, they have cultivated and preserved this tradition for generations. Therefore, when the marquise married an Italian, she decided to procure local raw materials and collaborated with General Staglieno, the “first master of winemaking for the queen”, to produce a wine made with Nebbiolo grapes.
King Carlo Alberto
In the history books it is recalled that King Charles Albert of Savoy wanted to taste the “new wine” she made, so the marquise gave the king 325 Carrà of wine, so that every day of the year (except during periods of fasting ), the king could taste 1 Carrà of fine wine.
This story is remembered among the events of the Italian monarchy, because the Carrà is a wooden barrel pulled by a cart, whose capacity, converted into the current unit of measurement, is almost 600 liters! ! !
Obviously the king alone could not drink so much wine, so he brought these wines as royal gifts from the Savoy family to the other royal families of various European countries. The fame of Barolo wine in Europe is also due to this heroic marquise.
But few kings are not greedy. To always have good wine to drink, Carlo Alberto bought a vegetable garden not far from the Marquise’s house to start producing his own wine. Subsequently, the tradition of buying a vegetable garden to make Barolo wine was handed down from generation to generation in the Savoy family. From this we understand the fundamental importance that wine plays in the life of Italians.
Traditional Barolo needs to be aged in large wooden barrels for several years, even decades, and then bottled or filled in wooden barrels, and then shipped to all parts of Europe. The two Savoy kings, Carlo Alberto and Vittorio Emanuele II , both exponents of the last Italian dynasty, built their own wineries in the Langhe, such as the Verduno Castle and the Fontanafredda estate.
The present life
In the Langhe, on the hills near the former Italian imperial capital (Turin), except for a few nobles and royals, the common people lived for a long time trapped in poverty. Families guarded their own patch of land, grew grapes, raised cattle and sheep, and worked hard to support themselves.
Families who had the ability to produce wine with the conditions traditionally placed the grapes in huge wooden barrels, these large chestnut wood barrels, handed down from generation to generation, were often the family’s greatest assets. The wine, stored in them, lasted for more than ten years or even decades.
The winegrowers who did not have the economic means to deal with the production of wine, could not do anything but sell the grapes to intermediaries. In all the Langhe there were only five or six intermediaries in the 1960s and 1970s, who sent people to collect grapes harvested in the farmers’ fields during the harvest season and resold them at higher prices in France, not far from there. . Farmers often had to wait until the following spring to receive compensation for the sale of the grapes. The oldest among the Langhe still remember those times, and when they talk about it they shed bitter tears.
This situation continued until the early 1980s. At that time, the tension in the global political situation eased, the European economy recovered, the Italian national team won the World Cup and the whole country celebrated. In that period, the first private television stations were born and the quality of life of the Italians experienced a great leap of improvement. More and more young people began to be eager for new ideas from the outside. And so are the young people of the Langhe.
Barolo – a bunch of young rebels
In the 80s and 90s, a group of rebellious young people appeared who wanted to break the tradition of their ancestors and had the ambitious goal of producing the best wine in the world: they were the “Barolo Boys” .
The story of what happened in the Langhe is the following. A boy named Elio decided to leave on board his Fiat from Italy to Burgundy in France to make a “pilgrimage” to this temple of wine. Since he had no money to stay in a hotel, he could only sleep in the car every day. When he arrived in Burgundy, he entered, very excited, in a cellar, and saw the owner of the cellar go out with his luggage, so he came forward and said to him: “Hi, my name is Elio, I come from Barolo in Italy, my family is wine. I’m here to try your wine. “
The owner of the company put his bags in the back seat of his Porsche and replied: “Oh, I’m sorry, now I’m going on vacation to the beach!”
Elio stood there for a long time with his mouth open: he too a winemaker, he could only sleep curled up in his car, while the French winemakers had Porsches, sailing boats and holidays. Barolo, a wine like French wines, can only be sold in bulk, and even if bottled, a bottle can sell for a maximum of just over a thousand lire, but any bottle of wine produced in Burgundy costs ten or more times the price. of a Barolo. “Why are the French better than us ?!”
After returning to Italy, he invited a group of peers with vineyards to his home to begin studying French winemaking methods. They discovered that the French paid particular attention to the quality of the grapes: Burgundy has a high latitude and the light during the year is not always abundant, so during the ripening period of the grapes, the sugary and aromatic components may not be formed sufficiently . Therefore, the French prune some of the grapes from the branches before ripening, so that the sugar can concentrate in a few bunches of grapes.
In other words, the number of leaves on each grape is fixed and the nutrients produced by photosynthesis each day are limited. These nutrients must be distributed to all berries on the shoot. The smaller the dividend, the more nutrients each grape can get. This mors tua vita mea is as fierce as in a palace intrigue movie, or it may be reminiscent of the stories of Macau’s gambling king and wives fighting for inheritance.
Therefore, in the cultivation of grapes, one must always choose between quality and quantity. In the poor Langhe, winemakers naturally did not waste even a single grape, so these young people could only go to their fields at night, secretly, to steal only a part of the unripe grapes and throw it away. Of course, this was met with extreme resistance by the older generation, who considered it a blasphemy against hard work. There were even some older workers who threw the shears at them and since then they have not appeared in the vineyard again.
But these were not the most difficult steps in their innovation journey. When with the saw they cut their large wooden barrels to pieces and passed to the French oak barrels to mature the wine, some were disinherited because they were considered crazy by their fathers.
Why abandon the large wooden barrels of our ancestors and use new medium-sized oak barrels instead? Here we enter into the merits of some professional notions on winemaking, I try to explain it here in simple language.
Everyone knows that there is something called tannin in red wine, which is actually a preservative produced by grapes, which forms naturally in the skins (as a natural defense of the grape) and in grape seeds (to protect the later generation). During the winemaking process, the tannins are infused into the wine.
At first he is more solitary (small molecular chain), and he likes to hook the receptors on our oral mucosa, producing the familiar astringency (if you don’t have this sensation, eat an unripe persimmon or a raw banana.). After a certain period of “micro-oxidation”, the tannins will hold hands and will lose the desire to attach themselves to the receptors on the oral mucosa. As more and more tannins are grouped successfully, the astringent taste will gradually fade, and the wine will soften accordingly.
So what is the best place for “microoxidation” ? In a new good-sized wooden barrel! Micro-holes in the wood can allow oxygen to pass through, but as deposits in the wine build up, these holes will be blocked, turning the barrel into a sealed tank and oxygen will no longer be able to enter and exit. The reason for the medium size is to allow the wine to touch the barrel wall as much as possible.
Ultimately, I just want to tell everyone: those large barrels that have been around for decades are not the best possible containers for winemaking. So these young people greeted them and made room in the cellar for the oak barrels (Barrique).
In 1983, these young men smuggled barriques into the cellar for the first time and covered them with a large piece of black cloth to prevent others from discovering them. With trepidation, they hope that different aromas will come out of these oak barrels, in order to show that their efforts were not in vain.
We continue to make wine, but there are no more meetings of the Barolo Boys, there is no longer that spirit of union and struggle in the moment of crisis. At that moment it was also discovered that the taste of Barolo oak barrels gradually overwhelmed the taste of Nebbiolo grapes …
“Were they wrong? No! Without them Barolo would not have the splendor of today”.
“Were they right? No! Because in everything there is a just measure.”
Sometimes I can’t help but wonder, “What is innovation? What is tradition? Will it become tradition if it is successful in innovation? Will those who innovate once become an obstacle to the next group of innovators?”
Most of the young people of that period now have a life path already mapped out, have experienced ups and downs and have gradually settled down.
The Barolo we drink today not only inherits tradition, but also contains a lot of innovation. However, there are no more extremes, and no one is disinherited (hopefully!).
I think that if the beautiful Marquise Barolo saw her wine appear on tables all over the world, accompanied by the warmth of the candlelight and the scent of the dishes paired with it, she would be thrilled.
