Barolo

The wine is Nebbiolo and nothing else, from hillside vineyards between 170 and 540 metres. The hills are old sea floor — the grey-blue marls and sands of the Tortonian and Messinian stages, raised from the retreating Po basin some seven million years ago — and the rules credit that calcareous ground for a wine both structured and long-lived.

Barolo ages for at least 38 months from the first of November of the harvest year, 18 of them in wood; a Riserva for 62. Since 2010 a label may name one of the zone's officially drawn vineyard areas, the menzioni geografiche aggiuntive, and a single vigna within it. The wine as it is known today took shape in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Giulia Colbert Falletti, the last Marchesa di Barolo, and Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, set out to make a dry, rich Nebbiolo worthy of the courts of Europe.