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Barolo Piemonte Wine
Barolo Piemonte Wine is an Italian red wine which is produced and bottled in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy. It is manufactured using the Nebbiolo grape and the majority of the wines are produced in three provinces – Alessandria, Asti, and Cuneo. Barolo Piemonte has been appropriately named “the wine of kings and the king of wines” because of its lack of opacity and its lighter red coloring. Barolo wines are characterized by their ability to age rather well and have the tendency to lighten to an orangish-red shade during the aging process.
As with other regional specialty wines, these only use a specific grape – the Nebbiolo – which has a unique aroma of roses and tar. In addition to its aging capabilities, Barolo Piemonte Wine is labeled as a “Riserva” (Reserve) once it has aged for 5 years or longer. In years gone by, the wine was characterized by a very tannic flavoring, and could take up to 10 years (or longer) to “soften” up. This was due primarily to the fact that the fermenting wine was allowed to sit upon grape skins for a period of up to 3 weeks, therefore creating huge quantities of tannins.
Additionally, aging in large wooden casks for many years at a time was another reason for the heavier tannic flavoring. As a result of needing to meet international taste preferences demanding a fruitier taste, fermentation times have now been reduced to a period of no more than 10 days and the aging process is conducted in smaller oak barrels known as French barriques. What resulted was a controversy between modernists and traditionalists referred to as the “Barolo Wars” as the latter group claimed that the wine tasted more like oak than fruit.
Early History of Barolo Piemonte Wine
Up until the middle of the 1800′s, Barolo wines in general were all considered to be sweet wines. The Nebbiolo grape is unique in the fact that it wasn’t totally ripened until the end of October, which meant that temperatures had already begun dropping towards the end of the ripening stage. Once in the months of November and December, the temperatures are considerably colder and completely halt the fermentation stage. This results in leaving significant amounts of residual sugars in the wine, hence its original sweet classification.
The Grinzane Cavour mayor, Camillo Benso, invited Louis Oudart, the French enologist to Barolo to hopefully improve the local producer’s winemaking methods and techniques. Oudart was successful in his endeavors to ferment the Nebbiolo grape until it was completely “dry” by utilizing cultivated yeast which was considerably more adaptable to the colder temperatures. In so doing, today’s dryer Barolo Piemonte Wine was born.
The new dryer, red wine quickly became the favorite amongst the Turin nobility of the day, as well as the House of Savoy, hence the onset of the nickname “the wine of kings and the king of wines.” In 1980, Barolo Piemonte Wine cemented its position in the Italian wine industry when the Barolo region was designated as being DOCG certified. The Barolo region was one of the first wine regions in Italy to achieve this status.