After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Italy inherited its physical and cultural remains, but authority fractured among city-states, bishoprics, Lombards, Byzantines, and later communes. This fragmentation endured for more than a millennium until unification in 1861, during which time, the country experienced repeated incursions and changing rule by Germanic, Byzantine, Islamic, Norman, imperial, papal, and dynastic forces. Amidst these historical vicissitudes, classical knowledge survived diffusely, maintained locally by cathedral schools, merchant families, legal traditions, and local elites. In turn, regions, cities, and municipalities developed distinct customs, traditions, and identities, rooted in local practices, not national institutions.
This tendency is most manifest in food, which for many Italians became a means of asserting local pride, preserving difference and resisting homogenisation; methods for producing these local dishes are passed from parent to child, master to apprentice, and neighbour to neighbour. In turn, deviating from local recipes is interpreted as insulting adulteration, not harmless adaptation. This tendency is so enduring that it is commonly satirised in modern online media, which portrays Italians as intensely perturbed by even the most modest deviation to preparing local dishes. TV chef, Gino D’Acampo, famously remarked on national television, ‘Che schifo’, and ‘Se mia nonna avesse le ruote, sarebbe una carriola’ (if my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bicycle) at the bastardisation of Italian dishes by British consumers.
Conversely, in France, Gaul did not inherit Rome’s physical core after its fall; instead, it retained its administrative, ecclesiastical, and intellectual memory. Political authority consolidated early under the Franks, who absorbed Roman law, Christian institutions, and Latin learning into emerging royal structures. The Carolingian reforms, particularly under Charlemagne, promoted the revival and standardisation of classical learning through monasteries, scriptoria, and schools. Unlike Italy, where diffuse knowledge survived locally, learning in France was increasingly preserved and transmitted by centralising ecclesiastical and royal institutions. From the High Middle Ages onward, Paris also emerged as a dominant intellectual, political, and cultural centre, culminating in the University of Paris as a focal point of scholarly authority.
This early centralisation encouraged the abstraction and systematisation of knowledge from the countryside to the nation’s urban centre, including culinary, agricultural, and artisanal practices. Notably, these institutions concluded that whilst distinctive produce with specific tastes was made across rural France, it is the varying combinations of region, soil, climate, and artisan which define a product’s nature, not the prescribed method for making it. In turn, the French notion of terroir eventually transmogrifies from literal dirt to a unique, localised quality to be protected in culture and production. Subsequently, French cuisine permits greater flexibility in recipes so long as raw ingredients are of recognised origins; it matters less how you prepare Lentille verte du Puy, Pomme de terre de l’Île de Noirmoutier, or Agneau de Sisteron, quality is inherently derived from the characteristics imbued by virtue of origin. Following this, the French fiercely protect origin, going so far as to riot in response to purported adulteration of local cheese markets.
In both nations, these varying philosophical and cultural perspectives also influenced wine production. In Italy, regions established and preserved detailed methods (including ageing time) for making local wine, often arising from socioeconomic, climatic and geographical constraints (if a negociant buys fruit from many small farmers, fermenting en masse in large barrels is practical), which were eventually classified in the Denominazione di Origine Controllata, and strongly determine the potential of local varieties, and the flavour of resultant wines. In France, whilst it is understood that a wine’s growing environment imparts distinct characteristics (e.g., spicy fruit in Vosne-Romanée), production methods are notably more varied, with individual growers amplifying raw material by evolving craftsmanship in service of varying, but more frequently understood, aesthetics.
Varying degrees of centralisation and fragmentation also affected scientific progress and literacy. In France, early political centralisation enabled the crown and the Church to standardise education early. Institutions like the University of Paris became national centres of learning, training clergy, administrators, lawyers, and later scientists. By the early modern period, France had developed state-linked scientific institutions (e.g., the University of Montpellier, Académie des Sciences, Grandes Écoles, and later the Bordeaux Faculty of Oenology and the INRA). This meant that by the 19th century, the French government was providing institutional support to winegrowers; by 1800, it had published L’Art de Faire Le Vin in 1800, a pamphlet by Chaptal teaching methods for managing everything from fruit handling to fermentation and safely cleaning barrels. The pamphlet also reported that urbanite amateurs regularly made better wine than rural farmers, largely because they were willing to adopt both new and scientific methods. Later, scientists like Louis Pasteur pioneered research on the microbiological basis of fermentation, helping reduce wine spoilage and oxidation.These advancements meant that when phylloxera struck French winegrowers, state institutions mobilised swiftly, supporting winegrowers (Planchon, Millardet, etc.) in identifying and combatting the devastating aphid, eventually leading to largescale grafting and nationwide policies to prevent recurrence. Practically, these institutional advancements meant that between 1950-1980, technical mastery of winemaking was relatively commonplace in France’s most celebrated wine regions.
In Italy, prolonged political fragmentation prevented the emergence of nationally funded scientific and educational institutions capable of supporting agriculture at scale. Although Italy hosted some of Europe’s oldest universities, these remained embedded within city-states or regional polities and did not receive sustained, coordinated state sponsorship. As a result, scientific advances in chemistry, biology, and agronomy were slow to spread beyond urban elites and rarely reached small winegrowing communities. This meant that until the late 20th century, it was commonplace in many Italian regions for animals to live in the same cellar used for making wine, for ‘pumpovers’ to be conducted by bucket and ladder, and for bagged ice blocks to be used for cooling ferments when fruit arrived warm.
The result of such striking differences in sensibility and technical capacity was that respective wine quality varied starkly. In France, by 1970, countless estates in celebrated regions had been producing compelling fine wines made with increasing technical competency for many years, in some cases centuries. In Italy, there were notably fewer estates producing lauded wines, and even in noteworthy regions, technical faults, oxidative handling, and cellar mismanagement were widespread. Consequently, when fine wine consumption erupted shortly after—catalysed by rising global wealth, increasing travel, and better transport and storage—Italy missed out, with very few estates meeting new global expectations. This misfortune was most pronounced in Italy’s most rural towns and villages, where conditions were already challenging.
In Barolo and Barbaresco, sparing a handful of successful growers, including Angelo Gaja, whose own ‘revolution’ antedates his neighbours, living standards were poor; following the end of World War II, many locals were forced to leave their villages to work for manufacturing jobs in nearby cities. Before long, the children of some local producers grew tired of these conditions, antagonised by growing awareness of greater fortunes in neighbouring France, and further afield in California, which was experiencing a great boon owing largely to Steven Spurrier, and later Robert Parker. A handful of these growers began meeting to taste international wines; some of them had also travelled and were struck by the successes of foreign winemakers. Most notably, the story goes that in 1976, Elio Altare drove to Burgundy in his Cinquecento and stumbled upon Philipe Engel leaving home to holiday on his yacht. Following a short stay, Elio returned home, convinced he could revolutionise the wines made at his family estate, and alongside his fellow Barolo Boys (Chiara Boschis, Giorgio Rivetti, Roberto Voerzio, Paulo Scavino, etc.) could transform the fortunes of local winegrowers.
The changes were radical; fruit was dropped aggressively, artificially lowering yields; short, hot fermentations in rotary fermenters replaced long, slow fermentations in wooden vessels; big Slavonian botti were carved up, replaced by small French oak barriques; and, in some cases, press wine was ditched at local distilleries. All this in service of producing cleaner, approachable wines more appealing to international drinkers.
During the same period, the group was introduced to Italian American importer Marc de Grazia, who took the protagonists on tasting tours overseas where they met new importers and thirsty buyers. In due course, Robert Parker, whose influence was reaching fever pitch, not only scored these ‘new’ wines highly, but wrote gushingly of this revolutionary bunch. In his burgeoning Wine Advocate, Parker remarked that; “Sandrone is one of the finest producers of Barolo”, and that his 1982 and 1985 were “spectacular”; that “Clerico is one of Piedmont’s modernist winemakers” whose 1982 Ginestra was “extraordinarily complex”; that “Altare is making some of the most magnificent wines in Italy”: and that Roberto Voerzio’s ’88 Barolo were “immensely impressive”.
This newfound critical acclaim came with tremendous commercial success; by 1988, the price of Nebbiolo reached 10,000 lira a kilo, and by 1989 and 1990, demand for grapes was so high producers couldn’t find quality fruit no matter the price. For the first time—not least because it had not previously been widely possible—these new admirers began visiting Barolo, igniting a great boom in local industry, resulting in new restaurants, hotels, and wine bars, all built, maintained and staffed by locals. Notwithstanding the abrasive nature of this change, especially in winemaking methods, during this period, the commercial success accompanying these new wines was a rising tide, improving the fortunes and opportunities for even the staunchest traditionalist.
Whilst this period was in some respects revolutionary, the winemaking changes were themselves surprisingly superficial. In true Italian fashion, the modernists, spellbound by the successes of their Burgundian neighbours and Robert Parker’s favourites, simply formulated a new, irrational recipe for making wine in a predictable, ‘worldly’ style. However, global drinkers soon grew tired of heavy extraction, overripe fruit and invasive new oak, and a new preference for freshness, finesse and ‘authenticity’ fast gained growing traction. This new preference emerged against a backdrop of increasing appreciation for authenticity and ‘natural wines’, commentators and consumers—despite frequent fearmongering that globalism would lead to greater homogenisation—increasingly gravitated to singular, characterful wines more closely reflecting person and place.
These changing preferences strongly benefitted traditionalists like Giuseppe Rinaldi, Bartolo Mascarello, Burlotto, and more, many of whom had fiercely rejected the modernist style, opting instead to maintain traditional, ‘minimal-intervention’ production techniques—the late Bartolo Mascarello famously expressed his ardent disdain for ‘modern Barolo’ with a hand-painted label declaring ‘No Barrique, No Berlusconi!’. Subsequently, between 2000 and 2015, tired of the glossy international style adopted by many modernists, disaffected collectors flocked to buy what Dan Keeling has come to call living wines, quickly transforming obscure, discreet growers into cult icons overnight.
Before long, prices for the most desirable wines skyrocketed, and growers like Rinaldi, Mascarello, Accommasso, Cappellano, and Canonica became celebrities—I had always received the most pleas to help with visits when I shared the quaint, rickety sign pointing to the late Lorenzo Accommasso’s winery and home. Subsequently, the modernists began revisiting their new recipe, dialling back extraction, tempering new oak, and reintroducing larger ageing vessels. Today, only one grower maintains a cartoonish commitment to the modernist style, going so far as to retain just half a kilo of grapes per vine for the sake of ‘concentration’.
Despite this revalorisation, by the late twenty-tens, global fine wine had left Barolo behind. Whilst collectors still swept up cult wines, and American and Nordic visitors stayed visiting in droves, a new generation of trendy collectors paid scant attention, and media coverage was limited, confined largely to Galloni’s Vinous and the back pages of Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate. Instead, these hip new buyers were an irreverent bunch with little regard for appellations and classifications, and despite also falling in love with the classic regions of Burgundy and Champagne, also embraced growers from all corners, ranging from classic French regions like the Rhône and Loire Valley to the Jura, Greece, Austria, Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, and more. Many of the most exciting ‘rising stars’ from those regions were themselves irreverent and had spent entire seasons working at the world’s most dynamic growers, including many from Burgundy. The result has been a kaleidoscopic array of fine wine bursting from the seams of both tradition and uncharted territory, helping redefine the boundaries of fine wine.
Around 2019, sparing a handful who came earlier, growers like these, from Germany to New Zealand, found their way to Barolo and Barbaresco, coalescing with a small-but-mighty bunch of worldly locals and spearheading a revolution in both wine quality and subsequently recognition amongst the savviest drinkers. Most profoundly, these growers learned from their Burgundian peers what the erstwhile ‘revolutionaries’ had so glaringly missed. Burgundy can be great because the best growers there, arguably more than any other place, perceive their home as a place where great wine can be made from prized land and noble varieties, and by varying means according to one’s own vision. Conversely, Barolo has traditionally been conceived more strictly as a way of making wine, defined by a rigid set of winery practices which unquestionably constrain the finished product.
Less constrained by such conceptions, these new growers unleashed nebbiolo, first by means of a vibrant guiding vision of the wines they want to craft, then by establishing an interconnected array of tailored agricultural and winemaking methods refined each vintage in service of the desired wine. Winemaker William Kelley has written that this approach, concentrated upon a coherent vision, differs fundamentally from one which either “prioritises abstractions over outcomes”, or prioritises radical changes including new practices or processes inconsistent with the system itself—neither method is compatible with producing prodigious wines of lasting intrigue. The impact of this new [Burgundian] mindset has been striking, resulting in both greater heights at lauded estates and a host of new, pioneering wines, themselves reimagining local varieties from vineyard to bottle.
In the vineyards, the outdated preoccupation with indiscriminate green harvest for ‘concentration’ is increasingly unpopular. Instead, pruning and canopy management is considerate and strategic, emphasising the establishment of an optimum perennial and vegetative structure for increasing living tissue and reserves to support fertility and resilience, improve sap flow, reduce disease pressure, and achieve balanced yields with proper physiological ripeness—one grower goes so far as to ponder leaving cuttings in her vineyard’s depending on their impact on nitrogen. Cover crops are encouraged, weed competition is conducted carefully by hand hoeing or undervine disc, and tilling is conducted selectively. Apical shoots are regularly left to grow, then braided not hedged, minimising lateral growth and encouraging focus on ripening, and working with vine hormones to support development. Finally, general vineyard management is considerate, largely abstaining from systemic products in favour of organic treatments, homemade fertiliser, compost teas, biodynamic preparations, and more. All this is conducted concertedly in service of growing ripe, healthy fruit suitable for making the wines imagined by growers.
In the winery, the ‘modernist’ practices of yesteryear are increasingly uncommon, as are the unexamined methods of traditional estates. Harvested fruit is sorted carefully, then delicately destemmed (often by Pellenc), generally maintaining a high percentage of whole berries. In some cases, the pedicel is painstakingly snipped, separating it and the berry from the peduncle and racchis, resulting in whole cluster fermentation with a smaller mass of stems—a costly method popularised by Lalou-Bize Leroy. Elsewhere, a mix of whole berry and whole bunch is alternated in the fermenting vessel to promote favourable dynamics. Fermentation itself is frequently spontaneous, often initiated by means of a pied de cuve to mitigate stuck ferments and resultant spoilage. Fermentation vessels also vary, ranging from open-top wooden vats to stainless steel and cement, including some producers who mix vessels. In other cases, producers utilise portable steel cooling plates inside vessels for chilling warm fruit, also helping to contribute to cleaner, more stable ferments. Racking and cap management are also different: because fruit is handled more delicately from destemming to pumping (via a Francesca pump at one estate) there are generally less lees, and what remains is of a much higher quality, thus racking can be performed less frequently and according to taste.
During maceration, submerged cap is less popular amongst these new winemakers, and where it persists, practitioners conduct it more carefully—some growers insert metal grids into vats followed by pumped juice to submerge the cap and keep it wet. Instead, maceration is generally shorter, and cap management consists of punch downs and pumpovers, conducted at varying intensities and frequencies to encourage oxygen before fermentation, and gentler extraction after alcoholic fermentation is complete. Some growers also sieve out seeds mid-ferment to manage extraction of all types even more closely, depending on ripeness and vintage conditions. Following maceration, pressing is increasingly performed by basket press; applying vertical pressure to the cake means juice percolates a greater quantity of solids, extracting sediment which enriches the wine during a long élevage (working with fragile, unripe fruit would foreclose the possibility of such enrichment). Finally, ageing still typically takes place in larger vessels, rarely smaller than a tonneau, and whilst the minimum requirements are strictly observed, the merits of such long ageing, as well as even longer periods, are increasingly scrutinised.
Until recently, the wines of Barolo and Barbaresco, despite obvious exceptions, have failed to reach the dizzying heights of fanfare surrounding the world’s greatest fine wines of new and old. And, despite both tales of grand revelations in Burgundy and the aspersion that ‘revolutionary’ growers were copying international success, winegrowing remained formulaic and prescriptive, consisting chiefly of unexamined processes tacitly received by successive generations. Today, a revolution is underway which flips this paradigm firmly on its head. A new generation of winegrowers is redefining boundaries, armed with both a clear, personal vision and the competence to grow fruit capable of making their dream wines. The results have been staggering; from Carlotta and Marta Rinaldi, Pier Busso, Nicola Oberto, Isabella and Pietro Oddero, and Simone Fiorino to Kiwi phenom Tom Myers, Philine Dienger, Dave Fletcher, and Giacomo Vaira, this new generation is enjoying greater global acclaim than ever before and finding eager new fans amongst the hip young drinkers hitherto uninterested. And, most importantly, making soulful, singular fine wines unique in their finished aesthetics but united in origin. This is the Burgundification of Barolo and Barbaresco, and the best is surely yet to come.
