Barolo, Piedmont, Italy – May 2018

We arrived in the Barolo region on a sunny Monday afternoon, the last day of April 2018. I had long wanted to visit Barolo, as it produces some of the most reknowned wines in Italy and indeed the world, being on a par with Bordeaux and Burgundy in terms of reputation.

First, a bit of geography. Barolo and Barbaresco are small appellations, South and East respectively of the city of Alba in southern Piedmont (Piemonte in Italian), which is itself the North western province of Italy. ‘Piemonte’ means foot of the mountain, and the region is surrounded on two sides by the Eastern edge of the Alps, which stretch all the way round to the Ligurian Sea, part of the great Mediterranean sea. In the south of the province lie these two appellations, which produce the greatest, most ageworthy wines in the region and arguably in all Italy.

‘King of wines; wine of kings’ is the moniker which Barolo attaches to its wines; the same expression is also used for the sweet wines of Tokaji in Hungary.

The wine in both appellations is made from the Nebbiolo grape, which is high in tannins but unusually pale skinned, so even young wines often have some of the garnet hue normally indicative of age. The grape is named after the ‘nebbia’, the fog that rolls across the hills of the region in autumn.