It was 1993 and Gaetano’s mindset did not fit with the Piacenza’s wines model, sparkling and ready to drink. From there the turning point. The vintage was very generous in terms of quality and on the advice of a friend and his Piedmontese winemaker he decided to try to refine a small amount of Barbera in a wooden barrel. Barbera and not Gutturnio because the quantity was limited and the small barrel is certainly more suitable for a low-tannic vine like Barbera. The barrel was a Gamba, 3.5 hectoliters French oak from Allier. Two years of aging and then in the bottle. The result was a complex, structured, fresh wine. Something that in our valley had never been produced before but was not yet ready, it needed more time in the bottle to be able to express itself in all its complexity. All this time and all this waiting decreed its name. After a long maceration useful to extract all the valuable material present in the skins, the wines deriving from the three different subzones are assembled in identical percentages. The vineyard planted in 2000 is the one from which must is powerful and concentrated. Being a biotype in which the clusters have very small berries, in the must the density of skins is high. The tall vine is placed on a strip of very rich soil, resulting in a warmer, more mature wine with softer tannins. The old vineyard, planted in 1969, lies on a stony ground and gives us a more slender, savory and refined wine. The assembly of these three wines allows us to search for complexity in our flagship wine. Aging takes place in tonneaux, 5 and 7 hectolitre wooden barrels, of French Allier oak. Most of the barrels are exhausted, they no longer have tannins to give to the wine. Our use of wood is to be read as a container, not as an ingredient. We exploit its porosity to have micro-oxygenation and natural decantation. Three years after the harvest, the wine is bottled without filtration. Then the right maturation is expected. Waiting in fact.
