Nebbiolo and the Red Grapes of Piemonte, #2

The main objective of these newsletters and the articles written in them is to educate and entertain our wine club members and others about the wine world. We have always felt that the more you know about wine or about our wines, the more you can appreciate them and ultimately enjoy the wine more. The article below was written by myself and our late tasting room manager Bob Meadows.

It is with great pleasure that we reintroduce our 2013 Enotria Nebbiolo Collina D Re. We purposely produced a good amount of this wine and charged a good price for it because I knew right away it was going to make a top-notch Nebbiolo, real world-class stuff. This is somewhat of a bittersweet reintroduction because the growers who grew these grapes, Lowell and Barbera Stone passed away this spring. This Nebbiolo vineyard is one of the oldest in California, planted in the 1980’s-1990’s. It was also sourced from the top of the hill, the Collina, the best part of this vineyard.

Now about Italy. For me Nebbiolo and the red grapes of Piemonte are some of the finest wines in the world. That being said they are also some of the most difficult wine in the world to grow and to produce into wine. Nebbiolo wines are some of the longest-lived red wines in Italy and the world. It possibly gets its name from several sources; maybe from the Italian word nebbia which is the fog which blankets the vines in the late fall as the grapes are being harvested, or from the word nobile which is Italian for noble or finally from the white misty bloom on the grape clusters. There are few places in the world where a trio of native red grapes make some of the finest red wines on the planet (maybe Bordeaux or maybe the Rhone). But for all intense purposes, Piemonte is such a place. With Nebbiolo in the forefront, Barbera and Dolcetto are great supporting actors. Let’s not forget others from this region, Brachetto, Freisa, Ruche’ and Pelaverga. If you’ve not heard of these, don’t feel misinformed. They are wonderful wines with limited access to the normal wine consumer. Brachetto make a fabulous sweet Muscat-like red dessert wine. The other 3 produce complex unique red table wines. Oh! I almost forgot about Grignolino. A favorite of many where my family are from in Asti, Italy. A light brick- red almost rosé with a slightly bitter feel. If you have never been to Piemonte it is one of the most dramatic and beautiful wine growing regions in the world with landscapes as far as you can see with rolling hills blanketed with green vineyards.

The Piemonte region unlike Bordeaux, was not always a prosperous wine region. It has gone through a few ups and downs before being one of the greatest wine regions in the world. In fact, during most of the early 20th century it was a cold, bitter, and poor place to live. Many Italians like my grandfather left there simply because it was so poor and destitute. It was really not until the 1970’s that Barolo and Barbaresco, two small towns and appellations in the center of Piemonte which are the ancestral home of the Nebbiolo grape, started to build its fame. This was helped by having several exceptional vintages in the 1970’s as the world became more interested in great wine. Nebbiolo, the King of Wines and the Wine of Kings, is for me, along with Pinot Noir, the world’s greatest and most captivating of wines. In fact, they share many similarities but could not be more different. I have always called the two “twin brothers from different mothers”. When made properly they can both age for many years, both go with a similar variety of foods; duck, lamb, mushrooms, wild game and great hard cheeses. Both generally do not have dark purple wine colors, more to the brick-red hue and both are hard to grow. Both leaf out early in the spring and are susceptible to spring frosts. But that’s where the similarity ends. Nebbiolo has large clusters, is extremely vigorous, ripens very late in the season, has high acid and high tannins and doesn’t like lots of new oak. Pinot Noir on the other hand has small clusters, is not very vigorous, ripens early in the season, has lower acidity and lower tannins and loves lots of new French Oak. 

Let’s now take a look at the most-planted Piemontese grape, Barbera. Because Nebbiolo always (by necessity) captures the sunniest and warmest locations, Barbera is usually planted in secondary locations, and these locations may have a wide disparity in not just temperature and exposure but also to desired soils. Therefore, as with many grapes that are widely planted, Barbera can take on a wide array of profiles, depending on the terroir of the vineyard. These styles can range from medium-bodied, fruity wines to more powerful, intense wines that need years of cellaring. But some characteristics are constant, such as the deep ruby red color, moderate yet firm tannins and pronounced acidity. Down through the centuries, Barbera has been perceived as an everyday wine which usually had a significant acidic wallop on the palate. But in the 1970’s a transformation occurred. A French enologist named Emile Peynaud had the temerity to suggest radical changes in the way the grapes were grown, vinified and aged. Traditionally, Barbera was planted in poorer locations (Nebbiolo got the good ones), was picked early (to be ahead of Nebbiolo) and was allowed to grow to prodigious crop loads (to drink while Nebbiolo was aging). M. Reynaud’s advice was to plant the vines in the sunniest locations to ripen to fruitier styles, to harvest later to further allow ripening and to reduce the crop load by ‘dropping fruit’, saving only the best clusters. He then recommended extended barrel time to further soften the wine’s acidity. This advice was followed, somewhat reluctantly at first, and Barbera quality jumped.

Here in California’s central valley, Barbera was being grown as jug wine fodder to add needed acidity to the flabby overripe grapes. By the 1990’s, Barbera sales and vineyard acreages increased radically and many new vineyards were planted in California’s better regions, such as the Sierra Foothills and the north coast, so that today there are over 8,000 acres throughout the state. As mentioned earlier, with this much variance in terroir, a single profile of Barbera’s flavor is difficult. But flavors of dark berries, especially black berry and black cherry, remain pretty constant, as is the wine’s defining acidity. If the winemaker allowed the wine time in barrel, there can be hints of tobacco, leather, violets or vanilla. If any of you were lucky enough to sample our 2006 or the recent 2013 Enotria Barbera Riserva, you know what we are talking about.

Third in the pecking order of Piemonte red grapes is Dolcetto, “the Little Sweetie”, so called because it can get ripe in the poorer locations and because it produces wines with sweet smelling and sweet tasting fruit, but not because it’s used to make sweet wines. The fruit is dark purple, leading to a red-purple wine with aromas and flavors of ripe blackberries and plums. The dark purple skin contains high amounts of anthocyanins, the compounds which produce dark purple color and tannins. Because of this, winemakers can limit the amount of time the wine sits on the skins; this still produces the dark color of the wine while limiting the extraction of the skin’s tannins, leading to a softer, fruit-forward profile. The best locations offer hot sunny days and cool nights, resulting in a well-balanced, direct Zin-like fruitiness combined with Merlot-like tannins, making Dolcetto a very seductive wine indeed. Because both the acidity and tannins are moderate, Dolcetto in Italy is a wine which is best when enjoyed within two or three years after bottling, but the way we produce ours with more structure and several years of barrel age, our Enotria version is much longer lived and more serious.

So, there they are, the red grapes of the Piedmont. It’s remarkable that these three grapes, native to the same place, can offer three such decidedly different and distinctive wine styles, from the powerhouse, tannic Nebbiolo to the complex acidity of Barbera to the soft berry flavors of Dolcetto. Now that we are growing all three of these grapes in our new Vincenzo Vineyard in Calpella, we will all get to experience the true nature of theses grapes in our Mendocino terroir. They will be different from their Italian cousins, but will retain the true character of the grapes and will produce stunning wine in their own-right.

— Gregory Graziano and the late Bob Meadows.