Winecast: The Piedmont

Hello everybody and welcome to the WineCast. After taking a look in the last cast at one of the signature grapes of the Piedmont, it's time to tackle that region as a whole. The Piedmont is a large and complex wine region with lots of moving parts, some of which it may be useful to expand on more fully in future casts. But the goal for this cast is to get an idea of how this region fits into the larger wine culture of Italy, find out what sorts of wines it produces, and to get a look at some of the important local grapes that are grown there. The Piedmont, or Piemonte in Italian, gets its name from its location near the Alps with the name meaning something like foot of the mountains. This is hilly terrain with some of the best vineyard locations taking advantage of hillside slopes with good drainage and sun exposure. The Piedmont is located in northwest Italy and in addition to bordering several other Italian wine regions, it also shares a border with France and has had its share of influence from French wine culture, especially from the wine culture of Burgundy. The medieval duchy of Burgundy, both bordered and controlled parts of this region, and Burgundian influence is probably most evident in the emphasis on varietal wine production in this region, with most of the Piedmont's signature wines associated with a single grape, though some minor blending is usually permitted. In terms of wine production, the Piedmont is a powerhouse and while it doesn't produce as much wine in terms of overall volume as either the Veneto or Sicily, it is the largest producer of PDO level wine in Italy, with wine at this quality tier being produced in a total of 42 DOCs and 17 DOCGs. PDO level wine is the name of the game in the Piedmont and it's one of only two Italian wine regions, the other being the neighboring Valle d'Aosta, that doesn't have a PGI level of production, with wine that doesn't meet the requirements for PDO production having to be declassified as ordinary table wine. In this sense, the Piedmont can be understood as analogous to Spain's Catalonia region, another winemaking powerhouse that's opted to put all of its grapes in the PDO bin. Given that there are almost 50 separate DOC or DOCG appellations in the Piedmont, we can't deal with or even list all of them here, but a few general considerations are in order. First, the Piedmonte DOC covers the entire region and works with a wide variety of grapes, including so-called international varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay, and Sauvignon Blanc, alongside local grapes like Nebbiolo and Barbera. The Lange DOC in the south covers a much smaller but very significant area that's also home to a number of the most famous appellations in the Piedmont. International varieties feature as permitted grapes here too, often in blends with local grapes, and you can make the argument that even though the Piedmont doesn't have an official PGI tier of production for use by winemakers to work with non-Italian varieties and to experiment, the Piedmonte and Lange DOCs function as a sort of virtual PGI because of their flexibility with international varieties. The real heart and claim to fame of the Piedmont though is a series of appellations that focus on varietal wines, often 100% varietal wines made from local grapes like Nebbiolo, Barbera, Dolcetto, and Moscato, among others. Though it's not the most planted grape in the region, Nebbiolo is the big dog in terms of prestige, and if you want a fuller treatment of this grape, check out my cast that's dedicated to it. Of the various Piedmont appellations that make wines based on it, the two most famous are Barolo and Barbaresco in the southern Piedmont. Here the wines in both of these production areas are 100% Nebbiolo and are famous for their long aging requirements before release, with Barolo seeing 38 months or just over three years minimum aging, 14 of which must be on wood for the Normale version of the wine and a whopping 62 months or just over five years for the Reservas. Barbaresco has shorter but still formidable requirements. Nebbiolo is a tannic grape and its expression as Barolo is famously tannic, with producers in Barolo traditionally harvesting this late ripening grape a bit early to guard against the possibility of frost or rain damage late in the season, resulting in wines with lots of green and unripe tannins. Nebbiolo is also a medium pigmented grape and to get the most color they could out of it, these same producers let the juice sit on the skins for a long maceration that could last up to a month and that also ended up increasing the tannin profile of the wines. Finally it was also traditional to age the Barolo in huge oak barrels, sometimes holding more than a thousand liters of wine, and that ended up scaling down the amount of oxygen that the maturing wine could come in contact with. The end result was a wine made in a style that required a decade or more of aging before it became pleasant to drink. This traditional approach to Barolo was challenged in the 1970s and 80s when several maverick producers began, among other things, picking their grapes later, shortening the macerations to somewhere around seven to ten days, and aging in smaller 225 liter oak barrels that increased the surface area of the wine exposed to the oxygen, and the result of their labor was a more accessible style of Barolo that could be drunk sooner than the more traditionalist Barolos. Their efforts also resulted in a big heap of controversy, with traditionalist producers often furious at what they took to be an affront to, well, tradition, and modernist producers doing nothing to assuage that fury when they did things like remove the old giant oak casks in their cellars, some of which had been in their families for centuries with chainsaws, though in fairness to the modernists those giant casks weren't about to roll themselves out of the cellar. This period of emotional if not actual physical hostility is often called the Barolo Wars and it'll probably get its own wine cast someday, but without giving away too much you can know that when the dust settled a lot of modernist producers and traditionalist producers found themselves moving closer and closer to each other and learning to occupy a middle ground between the two approaches to Barolo. Nebbiolo is an important grape in the Piedmont and wines made from it are produced in several appellations that were covered in the cast on that grape, so for more information on the ones listed here check that cast out. Barbera, a grape native to the Piedmont, is the most planted vine in the area that, in addition to its high acid and rich berry-driven fruit profile, also has the virtue of ripening earlier and more easily than Nebbiolo, and is often planted on sites that aren't good for Nebbiolo. It also has moderate to low tannins that can make it an effective blending partner with more tannic grapes. It's featured as a single varietal in several Piedmont regions that are easily identified by the word Barbera in their name, and the two most highly regarded of these regions are probably Barbera d'Asti, made with a minimum 90% Barbera, and the newest of the Piedmont's DOCGs, Nizza, whose wines are made exclusively from Barbera. Dolcetto is the second most planted red grape in the region, and like Nebbiolo, it's a tannic grape, yet it's also called a soft grape, perhaps because of its moderate acid profile, and its name, though usually translated as Little Sweet One, could in fact be rendered more accurately as Little Soft One. Like Barbera, it too is an earlier ripener than Nebbiolo, and the wines that it produces are generally meant to be drunk early and often. The best known appellation in the Piedmont for this grape is Dolcetto di Doliani, made exclusively from the grape, but there are more than a half dozen appellations that foreground this grape, each featuring the word Dolcetto in their name. Perhaps the white grape that the Piedmont is most famous for is Moscato, which is just the Italian name for the grape known in France as Muscata Petit Grand, and it's used in the Piedmont to produce the sparkling Asti wines. There are two types of Asti sparklers, both produced by the partial fermentation method, in which the fresh grape must is cooled down in a pressurized tank, either before fermentation has taken place at all, or after just enough has taken place to create one or two percentage points of alcohol. The must is kept chilled to arrest fermentation until it's time to produce a batch of wine, and then the tank is warmed up and fermentation resumes, or starts in the first place and continues until the desired alcohol by volume is reached. The wine is then filtered to remove the still active yeast and bottled. Thanks to the process of chilling the must, fresh batches of wine can be made as needed throughout the year. Asti DOCG sparklers are made spumante, or as full pressure sparkling wines that reach an alcohol by volume of between seven to nine percent, and still have a fair amount of residual sugar, about three to five percent, thanks to the high sugar content of the Moscato grape. Asti's clock in at around five atmospheres of pressure in the bottle, which is about the pressure you'd find in a sparkler made in the traditional method. Coming in with much less pressure, a maximum of two atmospheres in fact, is Moscato d'Asti. That, thanks to its low pressure, is best described as a frizzante, or fizzy, or petit lent wine that usually has around five percent alcohol by volume and lots and lots of sweetness, with anywhere from seven to twelve percent residual sugar. That, to be clear, is a lot, but in the best examples it's balanced by excellent acid. The four preceding grapes, while important, only scratch the surface of what's going on in the Piedmont in terms of local varieties, and while the following grapes aren't as well known as the foregoing, you can usually find them outside of Italy without too much trouble, and they're worth checking out. You can spot them because, like all of the foregoing wines, the names of the grape will usually appear in the name of the wine. Among dry, still reds, look for wines made from Fresa and Grignolino, while Brachetto can be made dry and still, or into a typically sweet sparkler called Brachetto d'Acqui, made in the same way as the Asti sparklers are. Arnese, a local white grape, is the grape that makes up white Roero DOCG wines, with the reds for that appellation being made from Nebbiolo. The name Arnese means something like little imp or little rascal, and is probably a reference to the fact that it's a hard grape to grow, but when it is grown well it produces wines that are full-bodied and rich in stone fruit and tree fruit aromas. Before producers in Barolo adopted production regulations requiring that their wines be made entirely from Nebbiolo, Arnese was a popular grape to blend into Barolos to help soften them, so popular in fact that Arnese ended up with the nickname white Nebbiolo or Nebbiolo Bianco, that it still goes by today, but despite this name the two grapes are not closely related. And last but certainly not least is Cortese, a white that produces crisp citrus-driven wines that are lighter than Arnese and are considered a great pairing with seafood. Cortese actually features as the main grape of a couple of Piedmontese appellations, but the best known and most highly regarded, as well as the most given to having multiple names, is the Gavi D.O.C.G. that you'll also see called Cortese di Gavi or more endearingly, if confusingly, Gavi di Gavi. Are there more local grapes in the Piedmont? Of course there are, this is Italy after all, but these will get you started and I have to end this cast someplace, so this is it for now. Thanks for joining me for another wine cast. I had the good fortune while working on this cast to check out a tasting here in Seattle of wines by a Piedmont producer, and there they are on the right, and it confirmed for me just how diverse, interesting, and downright good wines from that region can be. But with diversity comes complexity and the Piedmont does have a lot of moving parts to it, so hopefully this cast made the region seem a little less daunting and it'll inspire you to check out these wines and this region if you haven't already. Thanks for checking out this cast and if it was enjoyable and or helpful to you, please like and subscribe if you haven't already. I'm your host, the Unknown Winecaster, and I'm out. Enjoy the grape, but always enjoy it responsibly.