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| Le Piane Colline Novaresi Nebbiolo 2025 ArPePe Rosso di Valtellina 2023 Anzivino Nebbiolo Coste della Sesia 2022 Boroli Langhe Nebbiolo 2024 Lapo Berti La Morra Barolo 2018 |
| For this week’s tasting, we are pouring five different expressions of the Italian red grape variety, nebbiolo. Nebbiolo is responsible for some of the most profound wines in all of Italy, and we’ve been eager for this special evening for more than a month now, but the weather simply refused to cooperate, as the last thing you want to drink when it’s 90° F is a fuller-bodied, often tannic red wine, unless perhaps you’re lounging at the beach, at dusk, with a bonfire, blankets, bongos, and beef (what is this deranged, NC17 fantasy of an imaginary Annette Funicello film I’m nattering on about?). Now that the nights, at least, have turned cooler, and the last of the summer sweetcorn and heirloom tomatoes are a fading memory, it is time for heartier, savory dishes: braises, stews, Korean BBQ, and the like. Plenty of opportunities for glou glou wines lie ahead, but for now, indulge me with this first flush of autumn, with wines from the land of porcini and white truffles.
Despite how well-known and beloved it is, nebbiolo can be a confusing grape. It is a red grape with relatively little anthocyanin, the most important pigment in red wine. As a result, the wines it makes often lose their pigment quickly, fading to garnet, with a pale amber rim. Looking at a glass of such wine, you might suspect it will be lighter-bodied and lack grippy structure, or perhaps be a wine with some bottle age, but with your first sip, you must accept the folly. Nebbiolo can be a devilishly tannic variety, but in the 80s, there was a moment when winemakers began trying to attenuate the tannins, performing shorter macerations in new, French oak barrels (the tannins in the wine polymerize with the tannins from the wood, and have the effect of making a structured wine more approachable in its youth—there are unfortunate side effects, though, such as adding vanillin from the toasted wood, that can make wines made this way taste like wine from anywhere, and thus, nowhere). Wine pundit Levi Dalton once quipped that folks like to kvetch about the tannins in nebbiolo-based wines and suggested that if you do not care for tannin, do not drink nebbiolo. Tonight, we are tasting varied expressions of the grape, mostly from Piemonte, the grape’s homeland. In Alto Piemonte, the northern reaches of the region, there’s a long tradition of blending nebbiolo with a bit of a much lighter-bodied wine made from vespolina, and/or a darker-pigmented wine made from croatina, and our first wine, from Alto Piemonte, is indeed a blend of mostly nebbiolo, with a bit of vespolina. We then travel further north, just outside the region, to Lombardia, where locals call nebbiolo chiavennasca, and the wines tend to be more acid-driven, more alpine, and less extracted. Then, back to Piemonte proper, we taste a lovely, reasonably priced weeknight nebbiolo; a much more serious Langhe nebbiolo; and finally, a 2018 Barolo from a tiny, 2-hectare domaine. |