The Wine

Nebbiolo is Italy’s most iconic grapes, making two of the worlds top red wines – Barolo and Barbaresco in mostly family-owned estates in Piedmont

Viticulture and Harvest

At di Lusso, we grow two different clones of Nebbiolo – michet and lampia. Our selected clone, Lampia is the more stable of the two, but still presents difficulties in ripening. This is a challenging grape

The Lampia clone (origin Victoria 2000). Like many Italian varieties, Nebbiolo tends to over-crop, so the fruit was thinned during summer to promote greater flavour development during the ripeing period, but ensuring the canopy was as dense as needed to provide protective shade. The summer of 2017-2018 was relatively dry, yet as Autumn arrived, there were some rain events that we 'lived through' to harvest the fruit in early April, at greater ripeness than the previous year.

Winemaking

Picked beyond 14Be. With the benefit of riper fruit, it was an easy decision to aim at producing a 'bigger', somewhat richer style. The fruit spent ten days on skins (compared with only four the previous vintage), and 12 months in three year old French oak before bottling in early 2019. The wine spent a further nine months in bottle before release.

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A wine with the customary light colour with aromas of rose petals, autumn undergrowth and wild herbs with tarry earthiness. Firm tannins. A wine to enjoy with porcini funghi - on a risotto base, or French goat’s cheese. Nebbiolo is often described as a chameleon – its overall ‘tar and roses’ flavours evolve through about twenty years of its long life time.

This wine can be enjoyed for 15 years or more, yielding a velvety texture and gentle cigar box aromas as it ages.