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The Full Piemonte

by Bruce Schoenfeld
Premier Issue

Susie Cushner

I was still a sportswriter when I began thinking seriously about what I was drinking, and I had the sportswriter’s predilection for rankings. As I started to sample wines from around the world, I kept an ongoing top 10 list of my favorites. In those days—the end of the 1980s—I would have scoffed at the idea that some hilly pocket of Piemonte, in northern Italy, might someday produce the best wine in the world. The wines I’d tasted from Piemonte tended to be harsh and unrefined. After one of those cold, foggy summers in which rain falls for days at a time—which in Piemonte is seven or eight summers out of every 10—the wine would be underripe and fiercely tannic, like oversteeped tea flavored with raw cabbage. Even wines from a classic vintage like 1989 needed at least a decade before they softened up enough to be pleasurable.

That made Barolo, the most exalted wine from the region, a novelty at best. Claiming it as a favorite wine would have been beyond quirky, like having Spinal Tap as a favorite band or rooting for Northeastern to win the Beanpot. Yet Barolos were expensive, on par with top Napa Cabernets. At one particularly disappointing tasting in the mid-1990s, at which I sipped flight after flight of stingy, weedy $40 and $50 Barolos, I wrote in my reporter’s notebook (left over from sportswriting days), “Why would anyone ever buy this?”

My tastes have changed since then, but Barolo has changed far more. I’ve lately returned from Italy convinced that there’s no wine I’d rather drink. Today’s Barolo has the restraint and balance of a great wine. The flavor profile reminds me of dried cherries, yet fruitiness is almost an afterthought with Barolo. It is what Italians call a vino da meditazione, a complex wine meant to be savored over the course of a meal, for its nuances become apparent only with time and contemplation. If Napa Cabernet is a Hollywood blockbuster, Barolo is a fascinating foreign film, the kind you watch repeatedly because you discover something new each time.

But you don’t need to be a wine geek to enjoy it. Because of the high acidity of the Nebbiolo grapes that go into it, Barolo is far more refreshing than even the best Cabernets and merlots. Its ample structure—that tannic framework that gives shape to the fruit—allows it to pair well with grilled, roasted, or braised meats. In all but the hottest vintages, its alcohol level is moderate enough (13% to 14%) that two people can share a bottle and not stumble into the wall on their way to the bathroom. And prices have stayed comparatively level over the past few years. The $40 bottle that seemed like such an indulgence is now a bargain at $50.

What happened? Two things. A generation of winemakers’ sons left Piemonte for Napa Valley, Australia, and Bordeaux, places where vineyards and laboratories were introducing new techniques and technologies. They returned eager to make compelling wines like those they’d been tasting. Some of their fathers didn’t want to hear about it. But some did.

Slowly, Barolo and its sister appellation, Barbaresco, began their transformation. Over the course of maybe two decades, 20th-century winery practices infiltrated Piemonte. Vineyards were replanted with less space between vines. Progressive growers instituted the controversial practice of green harvesting, discarding some fruit during the growing season to give what remains a greater opportunity to thrive. Inferior grapes were declassified into table wine to raise quality. And moderating the amount of contact the juice had with the skin of the fruit made Barolos accessible at a younger age.

Simultaneously, the climate was changing. A degree or two of difference, on average, was enough to lift growing seasons that once might have been too chilly right into Nebbiolo’s strike zone. From 1996 to 2001, Barolo enjoyed spectacular vintages. “We’d changed our methods in the vineyard, so we were ready for these warmer summers,” says Franco Massolino of the producer Azienda Agricola Vigna Rionda. “But it had never happened before that we had six in a row.”

Those six vintages were all terrific but very different. Some aficionados prefer the traditionally styled wines from 1996 and 2001. Others enjoy the fruitier wines that resulted from the hot summers of 1997 and 2000. One influential critic, James Suckling of Wine Spectator, rated the 2000 vintage in Piemonte a perfect 100 points, something the magazine hadn’t done for a vintage anywhere else in the world. Yet many of us ex-sportswriters—and other inveterate raters and rankers—place 2000 no better than fifth out of six. The last time I visited, I had the occasion to try a Barolo from the bad old days. It was like hearing one of those insidious pop songs that you hated in high school, but that now fills you with nostalgia for your youth. I had to admit it tasted better than I’d thought it would. Then I popped the cork on a 1999 and toasted Barolo and myself, and how far we’d come.

Five Wines to Try From Recent Vintages:

Sandrone Le Vigne 1996 ($140)
A paradigm of modern-styled Barolo; will improve for another decade

Massolino Vigna Rionda 1998 ($70)
Silky, refined, restrained, with prototypical Barolo flavors Fratelli Revello Barolo

Vigna Gattera 2000 ($59)
An expressive, almost floral wine from a rising-star producer

Bruno Giacosa Barolo Falletto 2000 ($150)
Subtlety and elegance from a traditional producer in a ripe year

La Spinetta Barolo Campè 2001 ($125) (pictured)
Lush, fruity release from this most modern of producers

Bruce Schoenfeld won two Emmy Awards for his Olympics reporting. The author of The Match: Althea Gibson and Angela Buxton, he is a contributing editor for Wine Spectator and the wine and spirits editor of Travel & Leisure.