Endless rain, a million damp slippery leaves underfoot, shortened days, holidays seemingly long gone, it’s that somewhat depressing time of year. Enjoy the last exuberant blast of technicolour Nature and hang in there until Christmas.
But the season also brings its blessings – a new grape harvest, an abundance of mushrooms and, if lucky, truffles. In fact, I wish I was in the Langhe, trudging around the vineyards of Barolo, dreaming of the heady scent of white truffles and equally fragrant aromas of Nebbiolo. If only. As it is, all I can do is enviously watch people on Instagram. The 2024 vintage has been such a nightmare all over Europe with endless frost, hail, rain and disease, but you’d guess that for the tubers underground it might be good.
Anyway, in the meantime, and mindful of the exorbitant cost of truffles and ever-mounting price of Barolo, I thought it would be good to look at some of our favourite wines, no, not big label, dusty old mega bottles that have you on your knees with expectation (and your bank manager griding their teeth), no, ‘simple’ wines without pretension, but made in the right place by very much the right people. Bottles that tend to be somewhat looked down at as ‘poor man’s’ or ‘baby something more famous’… But what the French would call ‘vins de plaisir’ wines made for more immediate and relaxed enjoyment. No need for excessive critical scrutiny, analysis and scoring, no requirement for spiels of tasting notes and arguments as to similar vintages in the past. Just get the corkscrew, open and enjoy.
Langhe Nebbiolo.
Perhaps we should start with what it is not, which these days I think is increasingly relevant. It is not ‘baby Barolo’ and generally not made to be. The incomparable Maria-Teresa Mascarello (of superstar domaine Bartolo Mascarello) tells you to drink it in its youth, before five; Alan Manley (of Margherita Otto, who used to work with M-T.M and now fashions lovely wines I’d say in her style) stresses that this is his idea of a Nebbiolo for everyday pleasure. Do not cellar it for a decade and except it to transform into a true Barolo. For one thing, it’s often not the young vines of Nebbiolo grown in the prime Barolo vineyards – it comes from elsewhere, generally in less expensive places. It’s not built to age or going to add much complexity and once that fresh bloom of fruity youth is gone, well you may not have that much left to celebrate. And these days as prices of the top cantinas soar, you are not, sorry, going to sneak in with a baby star-Barolo at an affordable price. Drink it for what it is and enjoy. It can be so delicious.
So I thought we’d taste a fun little series of Langhes, two examples of wines that we drink quite a lot of (Margherita Otto and Trediberri) which retail for under 30 euros in Paris (and under 20 from the domaine!), one from the megastar of Verduno (Burlotto) that for some reason still maintains a down to earth price in the 30s and then two other Barolo superstars – Bartolo Mascarello and Giuseppe Rinaldi, where the prices are who knows what, I see around (even above) the 100 euro mark (at which price they retail for more than M8’s one and only Barolo or Trediberri’s top vineyard Rocche d’Annunziata, go figure…). Just for the record, the Barolos of the three stars now go for 400 euros or so (a rise of 500% in under a decade).
All that said, let’s now forget prices, though I think you can see my point that expecting to get a bargain ‘baby’ Barolo from a megastar these days is looking a tad outdated (though Burlotto still offers super value. But it’s never going to be his top single vineyard Monvigliero, a wine that we came across in an Italian restaurant as a mere 120 euros which had me super excited and nervous that it must be a misprint on the wine list. But that’s another story for another day). Let’s go taste.
Alan Manley had been in the trade in Colorado; fallen in love with the Langhe; worked for a bunch of big names such as Elio Altare (the renowned ‘modernist’ who took a chainsaw to his father’s dirty old barrels), Luciano Sandrone and M-T Mascarello. In 2005 he started renting a small parcel of vines and making a bit of wine for home consumption in the converted stable underneath his apartment in the main square of Monforte. Later he managed to rent a bit more and had to get official and regulated, finally setting up a tiny commercial winery just eight years ago – Margherita Otto.
He only makes two wines, basically in his garage, a Langhe and a Barolo, traditionalist wines of elegance and style. Funnily enough when we looked at his beautiful new botti and one small barrique and he asked us which wine was in the barrique, we all of course guessed the Barolo. Wrong, it was the Langhe. I guess small production requires small containers. Anyway, there is nothing vanilla or toasted oak about his Langhe. It’s a bright light red and very much in the red fruit vein (think macerated strawberries), fragrant, fruity, 14%, with a bit of (2022) tannins to remind you which grape variety you are dealing with. It’s the sort of bottle that you open without thinking too much and suddenly find it’s finished, too early. If you want to be a Barolo snob, it reminded us of another star’s wines, Giuseppe Mascarello’s top vineyards (Villero & Monprivato) in Castiglione Falletto. No of course it was not the same, or as good, (at a tenth of the cost) but that lovely elegant red fruit was more than a nod in that direction.
Which brings us to another man whose wines jog your thoughts elsewhere. Nicola Oberto is a larger-than-life character, bursting with enthusiasm, information and opinions. A real force of Nature. His father had been forced to lease his vines in La Morra (sacred territory) to Renato Ratti, but insisted on being the cellar master himself, a short time ago in historical terms but an eon in financial ones – a time when polyculture was needed to survive, chickpeas grown between the vines because they made more money than the fabled Nebbiolo which nowadays from a prime site like this is gold dust. Back then, just a generation, it was a subsistence economy, a struggle to survive, always precarious. Nowadays Nicola maintains his feet very firmly on the ground and produces a series of wines (Barbera, Langhe, Barolo and Barolo Rocche) all of them based on tradition and elegance. He loves to liken his Rocche to Les Amoureuses in Chambolle, the vineyard perhaps above all others known for its floral, sensual, silky elegance.
And the Langhe? Probably the prettiest of the quartet, almost a pinky red and, yes, that floral candied red fruit nose and taste, with a bite of bitter almond on the finish just in case you forget it’s Nebbiolo. We tend to open a bottle, immediately decant into a half bottle (which we cork) and drink the remainder, opening the other half the next day and though the aromatics and taste were the same, the finish was a little softer, so though these are not wines to make old bones, I do think they’d be even better at four years old than two. Trouble is we never seem to manage to keep them that long. I really should put one aside…
Burlotto ups the stakes as their foot-pressed, whole cluster wine from the Monvigliero cru is one of the handful of best wines in Barolo. A wine that takes the purity and beauty of floral aromatics to another level of elegance and brilliance. But his ‘plonk’?
Same colour, same style, lovely bright red, perfumed fruit. Again, I don’t think this is made to be aged seriously, but lovely aromatics for such an affordable price. Bravo. And whilst in Verduno, Fabio Alessandria doesn’t just fashion some of the world’s classiest Barolos. He has helped save Pelaverga from oblivion, and also farms a close relative (I think a parent) of Nebbiolo in the tiny commune of Roddi, in the northeast of the region. Freisa on the nose is obviously from the same stable, in fact blind I think I’d guess it as Nebbiolo, though on the palate it is earthier, with sweet strawberries (as its name would suggest), and a slightly bitter, tannic finish. It costs less than the Langhe, so it’s well worth a try.
And if Burlotto regularly tops the charts, so do Rinaldi’s Brunate (& Tre Tine) and Bartolo Mascarello’s Barolo. But this is where the story gets more complicated, as does the price tag. So why not take a top vintage like 2016, that at eight years old is probably just about right for a ‘serious’ Langhe to see what (if) it can really produce.
The colour of the Rinaldi is a lovely translucent red with just a hint of bricking at the edge, a good omen. The nose again shows a blast of floral red fruited fragrance, but here it’s more powerful. The wine is soft and thicker, hint of caramel, getting that lovely sour cream texture after an hour of air. It’s a touch ‘sauvage’ that reminds me of Gevrey-Chambertin, and the finish has a final note of sweetness. It’s not got the real weight or complexity of matured top Barolo, and it will not age for 15-20 years, but it’s seriously good. Definitely Langhe at its very best. If I could buy it again for the 40 euros I paid, I’d load up. But at today’s inflated retail prices I struggle to see the value proposition. There is too much Barolo available from top crus and serious domaines for less. But delicious it is, and a fabulous Langhe.
Which leaves us with the other old school maestro just up the road in the town of Barolo. Bartolo Mascarello’s Langhe sports the great man’s label (an artist with the paintbrush as much as in the cellar), a painting of bunches of grapes. Whilst on the subject, Trediberri’s labels are also vineyard scenes painted by a local artist (Pier Flavio Gallina).
Anyway, the 2016 Mascarello? The colour was a shade darker, the alcohol a notch up (14.5%) and the wine felt more powerful, a nose of almonds and red cherries, very Barolo. It was soft and again ripe, but the finish was frankly pretty rough and tannic. Should I have opened it a few years ago? Difficult to say – the fruit was lovely, but the structure was overwhelming, and not sure if/when the balance would have been best. The three other vintages I’ve drunk have been at age five and were better, but this bottle today is disappointing, and at current retail prices, terribly so.
But I do love the label.
So, there you have it. Not exactly an extensive or scientific analysis of Langhe Nebbiolo, but a snapshot of some of what’s on offer. For pure good value pleasure, think Trediberri and M8; for the same from a cult winemaker, think Burlotto (and his Freisa). And if you want to double the price (or more), well, I’m not really sure if the Bartolo Mascarello fits in, but the Rinaldi was the one wine that definitely did have aspirations of some grandeur, a noble courtier definitely comfortable in the company of royalty.
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