Resident wine journalist Louis Thomas reflects on Nebbiolo in his first post for Nebbia e Luce’s substack…
After spending most of my career in wine media, I have switched from the world of journalism to that of the fine wine trade.
My introduction to Nebbiolo, many years ago now, was not an auspicious one. It was tasting a Barolo in a WSET Level 2 class, a youthful barrage of tannins and acidity that nearly put me off this grandest of Italian grapes for good. I suspect I was not the only one to have that experience.
It was only after subsequent visits to Piemonte and tasting expressions of Nebbiolo which had been given the time they needed to mature that I began to see the delicacy and poise that can be achieved with it.
“The good thing about Piemonte is that generally the wines don’t go off. They age gracefully for decades. Piemonte is suited to a mature wine business,” explains Simon Farr, founder and chairman of Nebbia e Luce, and my new boss, over a glass of something red and agreeable.
In spite of the fame of Barolo and Barbaresco, Nebbiolo is not a variety which naturally flaunts itself. Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon have gone global in a way which it refuses to do so.
“If you look at the great grape varieties in fine wine, you will generally find them splattered all over the globe. If you look at Nebbiolo, aside from a few plantings here and there, it doesn’t do very well outside of north-western Italy,” says Simon. “There is a natural constraint.”
This constraint has, unfortunately, resulted in a blinkered view of Piemonte.
“Piemonte is one of the great wine regions of the world, but it is one of the least understood by the trade,” he continues. “If you go into Bordeaux or Burgundy, it is fully exploited by everyone, but with Piemonte there is a job to be done to give it the market share it deserves.”
Of course, when my interest in Piemontese wine started to take shape, it was Langhe which captured my attention, despite that initial encounter with Barolo. Glancing up the map from Alba, past Nizza and Asti, you then start to see names like ‘Gattinara’ and ‘Bramaterra’ and ‘Carema’, some of the cluster of regions given the informal name of ‘Northern Piemonte’.
After four years spent in wine journalism I had written countless articles about Tuscany and Veneto, and yet Piemonte, the region I have spent almost as much time in as any other in Italy, including a whole month in Turin, received fairly short shrift, and I hadn’t written a word about Northern Piemonte.
It is understandable why the wines of Northern Piemonte have not been headline news. Once a viticultural powerhouse, a perfect storm of socio-economic factors in the latter half of the 20th century caused a catastrophic collapse in its wine industry. Plots were abandoned and forest encroached where once there were vineyards.
Ironically, as disastrous as the downfall was, it has proven to be a viticultural asset in the 21st century, as Simon explains to me: “This huge polyculture enriches and adds complexity to the wine. It’s about balance. In viticulture it is critical to not think mechanistically. It’s moving away from a left brain view of the world. Wine is less interesting if all you think about are the mechanics.”
If we are to think mechanically, then Northern Piemonte certainly has all the correct components for a great fine wine region of the 21st century: a long tradition of winemaking, cooler growing seasons than other parts of Italy in the context of climate change and a myriad of terroirs which give each zone its own identity in the glass. Crucially though, it has the right people.
The producers which Nebbia e Luce works with are the driving force behind Northern Piemonte’s fine wine renaissance. Former sommeliers who swapped the late nights in Knightsbridge restaurants for heroic viticulture clambering up the terraces of Carema, octogenarians in Gattinara who do not measure but simply make wines using instincts honed over decades, merchants who fell in love with a bottle of Boca and knew that was their calling. Some of them came from outside, some left and then returned, some had stayed the whole time. All of them have that little spark of madness that is required to be a winemaker in this part of the world.
It was getting glimpses of these stories and tasting the wines which drew me to Nebbia e Luce. In my former life as a journalist I experienced plenty of incredibly slick multi-media marketing campaigns for what turned out to be very mediocre wines, but the wines I now work with get back to what it should all be about: enjoyment.
“People have used wine for millennia as a catalyst of connection,” Simon notes. “Human cadence isn’t about doing one thing all day, we are complicated beings. It’s not about producing ‘better’, more ‘clinically correct’ wines. We get better experiences out of an environment which is holistically conducive to that. Wine is not a particularly efficient alcohol, but it is a very efficient enabler of community and connection. That is its greatest attribute.”
I started my time at Nebbia e Luce with a week of tastings and vineyard visits in Northern Piemonte, and if that trip has taught me anything it’s that there are plenty more stories yet to be shared over a bottle.