Roero by name. Green by nature
Getting a peculiar sense of a peculiar place
Barolo is the supposed “Wine of Kings. King of wines.”
I imagine kings these days must have the occasional yearning not to be King. Even if their brother isn’t an alleged paedophile They must want to be able to drop the fancy dress and all the pomp circumstance and just live their life like any other Joe.
What would that look like? Well, fortunately or unfortunately for the “King” side of things we will probably never know. For the “Wine” side, however, there exists a Barolo without the monarchy.
It’s called the Roero.
Stories and tales are interesting way to approach a sense of place (terroir). Perhaps aren’t perceivable in the glass but they still function as an evocation of a place in writing. That’s why today’s article focuses in part on the wines and in part on an interesting tale.
To bring everyone up to speed, in order for a wine to be considered Barolo, beyond having been grown and vinified in the Barolo area, it must be:
made from 100% Nebbiolo
aged for at least 38 months
of which at least 18 have been in oak barrels
Just over 1 million cases are made to that recipe every year1.
It can be quite austere stuff. Whilst some of it is budget friendly, lots of it isn’t. A lot of it will also never really see the light of day, condemned to bonded warehouses to be traded, without paying VAT, from the collection of one person to the collection of another.
Sounds great if you're into that sort of thing.
It doesn’t sound so great if you are actually interested in drinking wine (what it’s made for?) instead of paying well over a hundred pounds a bottle nor wait 10 years to drink it.
The protocol for Roero reds instead looks like this:
95% Nebbiolo (100% for Riserva wines)
Aged for a minimum of 20 months
of which at least 6 have to be in oak
(side note: Due to the regulations, despite often being 100% Nebbiolo, red wines from the Roero DOCG cannot declare Nebbiolo on the label)
To break this down in layman’s terms, the difference in ageing protocols is reflective of the difference in tannic structure of the wines. As I will explain below, the soils of Barolo give increased tannins such that it is deemed necessary for the wines to undergo ageing in wood, to soften tannins, three times the length of the wood ageing for Roero.
A hermit in the cliffside
If I was writing serious wine guide, this would probably be the part where we go into a deep dive into soil types. Alas, this is an unserious wine guide, so a short overview of soil followed by a story about an unpopular, fez wearing, hermit will have to do.
Barolo’s soils are described as “calcareous marls” ie chalky, sandy clay. Long story short, when Nebbiolo is grown on marl/clayey soils, they produce powerful, tannic wines built for long ageing. Think dense clay and structured wines - viticulturists might take umbrage with that simplification but in this scenario is holds just enough water/wine.
Roero soils, on the other hand, are sandy. Like really, really sandy. Being lower in elevation than the Langhe hills, they came out of the prehistoric ocean much later than the Langhe - essentially they were a beach until much more recently than the Langhe hills were.
This makes for much lighter wines.
If Barbaresco is generally lighter than Barolo, then Roero is lighter still. Easy going tannins, easily drunk 2 years after vintage and drinks nicely with a short visit to the fridge before serving. What’s great about these wines deriving their lightness from the soils as opposed to winemaking choices as that they still carry a lot of complexity whilst also being lighter going - as opposed to some Langhe Nebbiolo which for some more economically minded producers is prioritised as a way to get Nebbiolo on the market faster, rather than create more entry level/approachable wines of quality.
A story of the sands
Born 17th July 1908 in Bra, Grasso rejected a civilian life and instead went to the hills of neighbouring Pocapaglia and dug himself a grotto. “Tall and sturdy like a chestnut tree” is how he was described by writer Giovanni Arpino. He is said to have only left twice, once to fight for the Kingdom of Italy in what was then Abyssinia, and the other to take a wife - the daughter of a . Following his time in Abyssinia, he would walk around the forest in a red fez. Local farmers would bring him eggs and, along with women as from as far as Turin, ask him for recommendations about herbal poultices and remedies. His accompanying recommendation for such remedies? Praying to the holy father and Mussolini.
Keep in mind this is the same Piemonte that I spoke about in the previous article about Italian cider, the one that was one of the centres of the anti-fascist partisan resistance against Mussolini. Consequently, the partisans didn’t take favour with him.
It has been suggested that the local farmers didn’t seem to mind his presence. Indeed, Italians of an older generation, still to this day, always seem delighted to have a chat with whomever they come across. So a fez wearing wanderer of the hills would have likely been a welcome figure to have a chat with for some of these older gentlemen.
Some, however, suspected he was selling information about partisan locations in the hills to the fascists. Others claimed it was his wife who was the more associated of the two as she was singing for the Blackshirts.
“Fare thee well, your hermit has been sorted out for good” wrote Arpino. On 15th of August 1945, the day of the Italian midsummer celebrations. Both him and his wife were shot in the forest and buried face down.
An ecological nightmare patchwork
Barolo and much of the Langhe hills are an ecological nightmare.
It’s an unpopular opinion, though I should make it clear that I don’t think this is the fault of any individual or group of individuals but instead a natural consequence of a wine with incredibly high demand.
Referencing the cru maps for Barolo and Roero, the maps showing the names of each vineyard and hill that winemakers are able to add to their labels if all their grapes come from that spot, there is a clear difference. Almost all of Barolo is under vine.
From one side, this means that there are no natural barriers to disease transfer. The overwhelming majority of these vines being the same variety (albeit with some difference in biotype), this brings a number of problems to the area. Problems that are only going to make themselves more known as time goes on and the climate keeps changing.
On the other side, it does make for an interesting understanding of the territory. Much like a person with no clothes on, nothing is left to the imagination. In winemaking terms, this means that there is rarely a case of “ah I wonder what the wine would be like if they planted on that hill over there” because more often than not, there are already vines in that area.
Here are the maps to prove those points, with each different colour referring only to a different name, not a different grape variety
First Barolo:
And then, the one for the Roero:
If your annoyed because i’ve put these maps too small for any meaningful details, that’s the point - I’m not so concerned about the overall size of each cru but more about how much wild space there is from cru to cru. Some may say that I have only used a cru map and not a total vineyard map. This is true, but a quick trip to google maps, though it won’t display the information as obviously, shows that the forest cover in the Roero is much, much higher than that of the Langhe.
I think this is best summed up by a poem I found whilst doing some light level research on Italian wikipedia, by Mauro Alfonso:
Between these hills, even the silence is green.
There is no such poem for the Langhe. As such, I have decided to pen a haiku focusing on one of the main differences between the Langhe and Roero, for journalistic balance
The vines cover all. Spraying abounds the landscape. What about my health?
It’s no big news that densely planted wine regions have above average pesticide use. It would also be unfair of me not to mention examples like the Cannubi Bio project, spearheaded, by Chiara Boschis, that has managed to convert nearly all of the producers farming the Cannubi hill to do so organically. It’s also definitely true that there are some vineyards are the Roero that are managed with all number of sprays.
However, where the vines aren’t growing, it isn’t just the trees and shrubs that are left to grow. It is the imagination as well. In the completely unfarmed parts, often a short walk away from the vineyards, steep cliffs give way to deep valleys. Walking in these parts can feel like entering a different time.
Phone signal is patchy but the ringing of bells in the local towns reminds you that you aren’t far from civilisation. This ringing also brings you to a previous age of maps and horse-drawn transport, where the bells of the small towns of the Roero guided those who were travelling from town to town.
I’m sure Barolo and Langhe were once like this as well, but they have big castles announcing their presence in the landscape. The towns of the Roero hills, by contrast, seem like they have been balanced on hilltops or wedged into cliffs - kept in place only by the locals, passionate enough to ensure their longevity in this strange landscape. By chance, I have met a few of these people, and they are quite strange in themselves.
One example would be the lady I met in the forest with a mop bucket and knife who had been out collecting Hen-of-the-Woods fungus, presumably to eat. When pressed on how she found them, she looked at us and told us that the tree had given them to her and her only - she had passed by a few days before and, knowing that they were explicitly for her, she took her time to return and eventually make a harvest.
I don’t think she would exist in the Langhe. Obviously I don’t have any evidence, but there is scarce little woodland where she could convene with the trees in the manner in which she does, let alone access them without being seen by every single surrounding property.
My coverage of the Roero won’t stop here. On Friday I will release the story of a witch who lived in the Roero - it isn’t relevant to an understanding of the wines but is still evocative of the wilderness of the Roero. I will also be chatting with producers, divulging more of the history of the place, giving some coverage to the white wines of the Roero and finding good bottles to recommend.
I hope these stories have, at least partially, piqued your interest in the Roero. If not oenologically then perhaps historically or folklorically.
https://italianwinecentral.com/denomination/barolo-docg/
Very good and informative Ivo, thank you, I will attempt to search out a supplier in the U.K.