2020 Gianni Gagliardo Castelletto Barolo DOCG, Italy

This plot is a magical place. Here there is one of the greatest biodiversity in the Barolo area, and it is easy to come across birds of prey, wild boar and roe deer. It is in fact located at the entrance to a narrow valley where a beautiful natural forest resides. This position, together with its orientation to the East, make it a vineyard with a particularly cool microclimate, with strong temperature variations in the hot season. In this vineyard, even in summer the soil tends to remain wet for longer, and after the rains it is always quite complicated to return to the vineyard. For this reason, choosing the harvest date is very important: in autumn after the rains, it is possible that the vineyard will remain impractical even for a week. It’s a vineyard with a particular balance that always produces very small bunches, and the thinning operations are particularly delicate.

In 2020, the budding occurred very regularly and homogeneously, but much earlier than the average of recent years. We had arrived from a mild winter and a very warm start to spring. The rainy spring created sufficient water reserves for the entire year. Being a particularly cool plot, coped very well with the heat peaks of August. The result was a great balance in the vineyard and perfectly healthy grapes, harvested at best ripeness.

Grapes: Nebbiolo

Harvest: 9 October 2020

Village: Monforte d’Alba

MeGA: Castelletto

Maceration: 14 days

FML: 100%

Aging: 4 small cask of 228lt and 7 years old

Bottling: 6 July 2023

Data: Alcohol: 14,5 % vol – Total acidity: 6,41 g/L – Dry extract: 32,6 g/L

Winemaker notes: This Barolo from Monforte shows a delicate marine and salty scents overwhelmed by the ripe cherries, plums and pomegranate skins on delicate flavors of rose petal, dried lavender and liquorice dust. Austere with a justified representative character tannins of the most typical Barolo but with a subtle softer roundy finish. Chunks of salty mineral zests on a balsamic note played the role of this Castelletto. In 2018 we’ve produced 1.062 bottles