Piedmont Wine: History of Barolo, Barbaresco & Nebbiolo

Piedmont wine is Italy’s most aristocratic — the source of Barolo and Barbaresco, the fog-shrouded Nebbiolo reds long called “the king of wines and the wine of kings.” Tucked against the Alps in Italy’s north-west — its name, Piemonte, means “foot of the mountain” — Piedmont has no coastline and grows almost no international grapes. It is a region of fierce local tradition that also, along the way, invented vermouth and helped unify a nation. This is the full story of Piedmont wine.

Nebbiolo and the fog

Everything in Piedmont begins with one difficult, magnificent grape: Nebbiolo. Its name is usually traced to nebbia, the autumn fog that rolls through the Langhe hills as the late-ripening grapes finally come in. Nebbiolo is pale and deceptively delicate to look at, yet ferociously tannic and long-lived, with a haunting perfume of roses, tar and cherries. It is also maddeningly fussy about where it grows — it truly excels in only a handful of hillsides around Alba — which is exactly why the wines it makes there, Barolo and Barbaresco, are treated with such reverence.¹²

Barolo’s French makeover and the wine of kings

Barolo has not always been the mighty dry red we know. Into the early 1800s it was often sweet and unstable. Its transformation came from an unlikely partnership: the Marchesa Giulia Falletti di Barolo, the last noblewoman of the Barolo estate, brought in a French oenologist, Louis Oudart, to make a fully dry, age-worthy wine in the Bordeaux mould. The new Barolo caught the attention of the most important man in Italy — Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, the statesman who would engineer Italian unification, and himself a Nebbiolo grower at nearby Grinzane. Barolo became the favoured wine of the House of Savoy and of the Risorgimento itself: the “wine of kings” that helped a new nation toast its own birth.³

Italy’s most patriotic red was perfected with the help of a French winemaker — and poured at the birth of the nation.

The Barolo Wars

A century later, Barolo tore itself apart over how it should be made. Through the 1980s and ’90s a generation of “modernists” — the so-called Barolo Boys — embraced shorter fermentations and small new French oak barriques to make richer, earlier-drinking wines, while “traditionalists” defended the old regime of long maceration and large old casks. The feud was bitter and deeply personal, splitting families and villages. It cooled into an uneasy truce, and the lasting result was simply better wine across the board — but the “Barolo Wars” remain the most famous stylistic battle in modern Italian wine.⁴

Gaja, and the making of Barbaresco

If Barolo is the king, Barbaresco — from villages a few miles away, on slightly warmer, faster-ripening ground — was long treated as its quieter sibling. One man changed that. From the 1960s, Angelo Gaja dragged Barbaresco onto the world stage almost single-handedly: bottling individual vineyards, charging prices no Italian wine had dared, adopting French barriques, and marketing with ferocious energy. He proved that a Piedmontese red could sit at the very top table of world wine, and in doing so lifted the reputation of the whole region behind him.⁵

The everyday reds: Barbera and Dolcetto

Barolo and Barbaresco are what Piedmont is famous for — but not what the Piedmontese drink every day. That honour belongs to Barbera, the region’s most-planted grape, all bright acidity and dark fruit, once dismissed as a peasant wine and now taken seriously in its own right; and to soft, plummy Dolcetto (“the little sweet one,” though it is made dry), the wine to open young with a plate of local food. Together they are the everyday backbone of a region whose reputation rests on its aristocrats.⁶

Bubbles, vermouth, and the court at Turin

Piedmont’s capital, Turin, was the seat of the House of Savoy and the first capital of a united Italy — and it left two sweeter marks on the wine world. In the hills of Asti, the Moscato grape makes gently sweet, low-alcohol sparkling wines — Moscato d’Asti and Asti Spumante — among the most charming and underrated wines in Italy. And in Turin itself, in 1786, a young man named Antonio Benedetto Carpano created the first commercial vermouth, infusing local white wine with wormwood and spices; it became the obsession of the Savoy court and, eventually, the backbone of the cocktail. Piedmont, in other words, gave the world both the martini’s vermouth and the negroni’s — and, from the same hills, the white truffles of Alba to eat alongside.⁷

The Langhe, a UNESCO landscape

The hills that make all this — the Langhe, Roero and Monferrato — are among the most beautiful vineyard country on earth: steep, tightly-combed ridges of hazelnut groves and Nebbiolo, studded with medieval castles and filled each autumn with fog. In 2014 UNESCO inscribed the whole “Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero and Monferrato” as a World Heritage Site — an acknowledgement that here, more than almost anywhere, the wine and the shape of the land are one and the same thing.⁸

Piedmont’s answer to Burgundy

Like Burgundy, Piedmont has come to believe that the exact patch of hillside matters more than anything else. Growers had long spoken of favoured single vineyards, and in 2010 the idea was made official: Barolo was mapped into some 170 named crus, the Menzioni Geografiche Aggiuntive (“additional geographical mentions”), so a label can now name the precise slope a wine came from. The most storied of them, Cannubi — a ridge whose name has appeared on bottles since the 1700s and which growers have gone to court to define — is Piedmont’s Romanée-Conti: proof that this corner of Italy shares Burgundy’s deepest conviction, that a wine is the voice of one specific piece of ground.⁹

Every Piedmont wine story on This Day in Wine History

Go deeper on the grapes, the feuds and the families behind Piedmont wine:

• Nebbiolo: the noble grape of Barolo and Barbaresco
• The revolution of Barolo: traditionalists vs modernists
• Angelo Gaja: the king of Barbaresco
• Barbera: Piedmont’s underrated everyday red

See all Piedmont articles →

Frequently asked questions

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To go deeper, these books make excellent companions:

The Oxford Companion to Wine

Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding

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The World Atlas of Wine

Hugh Johnson & Jancis Robinson

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Native Wine Grapes of Italy

Ian D’Agata

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Sources & further reading

1. Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding, eds., The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), s.v. “Piedmont”; and Nicolas Belfrage MW, Barolo to Valpolicella: The Wines of Northern Italy (London: Faber & Faber, 2003). Oxford Reference. ↩ ↩
2. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Nebbiolo”; and Ian D’Agata, Native Wine Grapes of Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). University of California Press. ↩ ↩
3. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Barolo”; and Marchesi di Barolo, “History” (on the Falletti, Louis Oudart and Cavour). marchesibarolo.com. ↩ ↩
4. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Barolo” — on the modernist–traditionalist “Barolo Wars.” ↩ ↩
5. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Gaja” and “Barbaresco.” ↩ ↩
6. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Barbera” and “Dolcetto.” ↩ ↩
7. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Asti” and “Moscato”; and “Antonio Benedetto Carpano” (the 1786 invention of vermouth in Turin), Wikipedia. Encyclopædia Britannica, “vermouth”. ↩ ↩
8. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero and Monferrato” (inscribed 2014) (primary source). whc.unesco.org. ↩ ↩
9. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Barolo” and “cru” — on the Menzioni Geografiche Aggiuntive (2010) and Cannubi. ↩ ↩