Hey, Barrel to Bottle, back in your feed, up in your ear holes. I'm Pat, I'm the local distributor for Pearson Salted Nut Rolls. Yes, highly localized distribution. Several friends contractually obligated, of course, in the room today. Who else is here? Hi, I'm Chris, I do wine. Roger from beer. Roger, nut roll enthusiast. Yep. And I'm Ray, and I also do wine. Welcome back, Ray. How's your nut roll game, though? So far so good. Pat's been taking care of me. All right, why are we here today? What are we talking about? Well, I literally just threw together a little podcast about Piedmont wine. A nut roll pairing. A nut roll pairing. Okay. My first thought was Northern Italy had a really good vintage in 2019. So there's a lot of hype around Brunello's, which are coming out now, and also 2019 Barolo and Barberesco. The vast majority of them, especially the high-end single vineyard stuff is not even out yet. Also, when I was looking at the shelf, I'm like, yeah, this can get really expensive, really fast, because Barolo is not a cheap category, but we have some very well-priced Barolo, and they're all 2019s, but I also thought I'd throw in some of the Cheapo Barolo, that's your theme today? Yeah, from a great vintage. So we're tasting Piedmont wine, and we're not going to taste any vermouth? That is correct. Come on, man. That is correct. Not every podcast episode can be about Amaro, much to your chagrin. Well, you know, vermouth in the Piedmont is made with Moscato. And of course, you know, we've got Moscato d'Asti from that area. And Asti is right in this same region. We're going to look at the broader Langhe Hills, which is a broad region that contains Barolo, Barbaresco kind of surrounds it. And we're also going to look at a couple of wines that are kind of the everyday drinking wines of the region, Dolcetto and Barbera. Okay, I think we're going to start with Barbera. I'll pass this around. This is a Ca del Sarto 2021. This is a Binny's Vineyard Direct Wine, but it is incredibly well made. It's a big, bold expression of Barbera. I'm a big fan of the label art. There's a man dancing with a huge pair of shears. Like that LSD flashback sequence in the Big Lebowski? He's going to be run over by a bowling ball soon. Barbera is a grape variety that's widely grown. It's a heavy cropper, so you get lots of grapes. But if you drop some fruit along the way, you can make a relatively concentrated wine. Generally, you have really, really high acidity here. But this wine is really, really ripe. I think it clocks in around 15% alcohol, which is very unusual. Oh, this wine's great. Yeah, generally, they're cherry bombs. It's just loads of cherry fruit. And the acidity makes it a great wine for the dinner table. You can pair it with simple things like pizza, Italian sausage. But it'll also handle... What can't you pair with Italian sausage, honestly? This is made by the Grimaldi Winery. And as is the tradition in this area, this is not aged in any small barriques or anything. It's aged in large Slovonian oak boaty. Not to be confused with Slovenian oak. Yeah. True. Very true. Do not confuse the two. Is the cherry coming from just the fruit then? Or is it even from the oak at all? No. The oak in these wines is generally neutral. So what they don't want is new oak influence. They want the fruit to shine. Looking for oxidative aging only. Yeah. This area is very famous for Nebbiolo, the top grape variety here that's responsible for Barberesco and Barolo. If you're making it in a very traditional style in these large boti. And some people are modernists too. They use French oak barriques and it's less oxidative. But when they're released, they often look like a wine from another area that's like 15 years old. So quick one on one on Nebbiolo here. That's the driving grape variety across the region, besides Moscato, right? Yeah, it's what's responsible for all the finest wines, Barolo and Barbaresco. Barolo, Barbaresco and also Dolcetto. Dolcetto is a grape variety unto itself. Okay. And we're going to try that in a minute. Okay, but we're starting with a Barbaresco. No, Barbera. Barbera. So don't confuse Barbaresco and Barbera. Barbera is the grape variety here. This is specifically Barbera d'Alba. This is why I stuck to Ichnusa and Vintage Shelt, the decorative Amaro when I was there. Barbera d'Alba. Barbera d'Alba. Okay. So, and that is, Barbera is not Nebbiolo. It is not. It's its own grape variety. Like I said, a large cropping high acid. Yeah, I'm trying to just confuse the listeners so much more than they already were. Well, it doesn't. I wanted them to give a breakdown of the two distinctly different wines that Nebbiolo makes, but we're tasting neither, so it doesn't matter. It doesn't help that Barberesco basically has the word Barbera in it. Yeah. But anyway, we bring this in and we sell it at a very fair price, and I think the quality is very high. This is $17.99, but it's on sale at $14.99. Not bad. And this is your prototypical Tuesday night pizza wine. Screaming acidity here, which will cut through even the heartiest of cheese pizzas. Absolutely. If you're down with the Chicago deep dish, it's a casserole, not actually a pizza game. This will actually cut through that. Yeah, exactly. And that's the whole thing about this. Roger, you get down with deep dish? Screaming acidity for your screaming Sicilian pizza. Little Bessie's Revenge. You know, those screaming Sicilians aren't bad for frozen pizza. They aren't at all. I mean, if you don't get them on sale, they're pretty expensive. It's no home run in though. Of course. I mean, we listen. Obviously, I don't know if you can tell by the general shape of my personage, but I am a fan of the butter crust. And you are a Beverlyite at heart. So I mean, come on. Yeah. Do love home run in. I absolutely get down with the deep dish. Are you kidding me? I can't stand the way people are always like, Chicago pizza. It's like eating a huge meal. I don't even know what that means. Yes, it's a meal. Every meal I eat is a huge meal. I prefer it to having to fold up my pizza like worthless New York pizza. Well, you know, at the beginning of Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta walks up to a pizza window and they're like, I'll take, I think he orders two and he put stacks of them in folders. So, you know, he's building a Chicago style where he can get it. Yeah, you fold it enough times, you basically have deep dish. Right. This is a nice wine. You weren't joking about the cherry is an expressive flavor. Yeah. Yeah, it's a cherry bomb. Hello, daddy. Hello, mom. Cherry bomb. That's early Joan Jett in case you're wondering. So, everybody like this one? Yeah, this is good. I think it was a great addition to our Vineyard Direct line. I like seeing more continental classic wines. I thought this was a great addition to the podcast. Why, thank you. You did a great job on the first wine. I agree. I like seeing more kind of European wines though in the Vineyard Direct program. A lot of retailers have some private label Vineyard Direct type stuff, but it's just extra juice that's getting- Right. Not to mention our ass-kicking Cote de Rhone that we got last year. Oh, those were so good. Cheap too. Under 10 bucks. Okay. We're going to move on to Dolcetto here. I was on offense about which to pour first because this Barbera is pretty big. Dolcetto literally means little sweet one, but the wines are not sweet. It was Roger's nickname. Yeah. Dolcetto Adamson. When he was a hitman for the mob. You don't want to visit from Dolcetto. Double tap to the back of the head. So Dolcetto is also widely grown and this is from Vietti, a very famous winery. Iconic producer, iconic label art. Absolutely. Haven't had a lot of bad stuff from them. No. No. Really great Barolo producer. The interesting thing that happened though, the Corrado family, which owned it forever, I mean, been around for over a century, sold in 2016 and then the main driving force, Luca Corrado and his wife Elena left in 2023. This is 2022. I don't know how much they had to do with this or not. So this is Vietti Dolcetto. Yes. And this is 2022. This is a freshie. It is. So both Barbera and Dolcetto in their kind of basic forms are generally not seen a lot of aging time. They're meant to be fresh, lively, everyday food wines. This is another good pizza wine. Yeah. Dolcetto is famously really vibrant purple in color and low in tannin, generally speaking. Although, of course, you can extract more tannin if you want and not as acidic as Barbera. OK, yeah. Little more tannin, little less acidity. I'd agree. Absolutely a good wine to showcase those two differences here. These first two wines. Beautiful color in the light. It's like got violet highlights. Exactly. Like if you're doing the four meat pizza, I would do the Dolcetto with the more tannin. Yeah, this Dolcetto in particular does have some firm tannin on the finish, which is nice, but it's kind of ebulliently fruity up front. Little spicy, kind of sweet spice. I was cooking some pizzas in my uni pizza oven last weekend for my kids, and outside of just cheese and pepperoni with hot honey, I thought, why not try this? And I opened a can of sardines I had and made a sardine pizza, and it was awesome. Nice. How did the kids feel about the sardines? My oldest one ate it. She's fine with that. Well, you know, sardines are not anchovies. I mean, it's much milder. I love eating canned sardines, personally. Me too. Have you had the coal fire version of the pepperoni and hot honey? I mean, I've had pepperoni and hot honey pizzas from places that make them coal fire, and stuff. It's great. I just happen to have, that's just what I had at home. I'm no good at making the dough, though. I don't get the big bubbles the way I want. Well, you need a long, slow ferment. I was told to increase the hydration, and that would help. Are you fermenting in the refrigerator overnight? That'll help, yes. It'll develop more flavor and better texture. Don't you know that about the dough? Get that beer-like fermented quality. Dude, I'm Irish, okay? I know how to boil things, and I know how to make mashed potatoes. You're a big pizza guy, though, and you're the Chicago guy. I am a big pizza guy, but I'm a big pizza eater, not a big pizza maker. So anyway, very friendly wine, I think, and also very versatile at the table. Yeah, this is great. Every wine I've ever had from Vietti has been awesome. Yeah, absolutely. And they make some very expensive single vineyard Barolos. Very nice. This is $19.99 on sale for $16.99. Not bad. So great price on it, too. Here, pass that back over. Let me take a picture of that one. Remember, folks, if you have a wine you enjoy, take a picture of the label. That way, you are not the next customer to walk in and go, you know, I had this wine and I think it had a dog chasing a bird on it. And I think it was from the Canary Islands. It was maybe from Italy. It's from those people. I say the camera phone is by far the greatest invention for doing my job that has ever, ever invented. It's been such a help and it's really great to not have to be Sherlock Holmes. Yeah, 20 questions with every... That's a really good point. I mean, 15 years ago, it was not as easy to help people find what they were looking for in our stores. When they couldn't remember the name of it. Yeah, it's weird. It's almost like there's a syndrome of wine amnesia. Like, literally, you could be talking to someone who could recite like, you know, 13th century Italian poetry to you, but they can't remember what the wine name was that they had last night. Maybe it has something to do with the alcohol. You might be on to something here. Okay, so now we're going to move on to Nebbiolo proper. So this is the kind of starring grape variety in the area. The root is Nebia in Latin or Italian, which means cloud or fog. And this is a hilly, foggy region with some elevation to it. And so we're starting... I was trying to drink some scotch here. We're talking about Nebbiolo now? Yeah, Nebbiolo. This is the kind of entry level Nebbiolo of the area. The broad region is called Langhe. You know, it might be sourced from within the Barolo area or Barbaresco or even outside of it, but it's generally gonna be from younger vines or something like that. This is Paolo Scavino, 2022, another really young one. Although Nebbiolo is famous for being quite age worthy, you can make it in a fresh and fruity style and that's generally what you're going for here. Scavino, very old winery too, you know, dating back 150 years or so. No, I'm sorry, about 100 years back to the early 20s. And they're a Barolo producer who kind of straddles the line between tradition and modern. They do use some barrique aging in some of their Barolos. Of course, at this level, most things are gonna be in stainless steel or just old Slovenia. Okay, so hey, if it ain't barrique, don't fix it. Now we can get to the Nebbiolo thing. Yeah. So they are making both, Nebbiolo makes both Barbaresco and Barolo. Correct. And the big difference, Barolo is aged longer pre-release, correct? That is true. It's got a minimum time in oak. If you were to- And bottle? Yeah, yes. There's a lot of Italian wines have minimum aging in oak and then in bottle before release. That's what I thought. Yeah. As an expert on all things Italy. Right. And we know you are. I kind of lost my train of thought though, what I was saying. Nebbiolo v Barolo. Time aging. Barolo typically more powerful. Barbaresco more streamlined, comes to maturity quicker. And Barbara pre-release Barbaresco is not aged or as much or if at all, you were talking stainless steel on this Nebbiolo. Yeah, so a lot of fermentation these days takes place in stainless steel, but then it's racked into boaty or whatever they want to use for aging. But some of them just stay in stainless steel. Wow, this is just a fruit bomb. Yeah. So pretty great. Kind of a modern or straddling line between modern and traditionalist producer. And the whole idea of a wine like this is that it is fruity and easy because Nebbiolo is notoriously just incredibly tannic, incredibly powerful, really age-worthy, very complex. How did it taste like this then? Shorter maceration. So if you look at the traditional way of making a Barolo, you might macerate the juice on the skins for weeks and weeks. And the amount of tannin you're extracting is remarkable. Yet there's not a lot of pigment in Nebbiolo. So often the color is quite light, but the structure is huge. So here we have pretty light color. It's not terribly bricked because it doesn't, you know, sit in a big oak tank oxidizing, even though this great variety is really prone to losing- Turn that bricky red color, yeah. Even on release you see that. And to Ray's point, the old school way of thinking of Barbaresco and Barolo, which they would call the king of Italian wine, would be the kind of antiquated- I thought Ray was the king of Italian wine. Well, he might be. Masculine and feminine is the old school way of thinking about that. There's other areas in the Piedmont where Nebbiolo is quite prominent, like we carry some Gattinara and things like that. Oh, we've had one of those on the podcast before. Yeah, they can be quite good, excellent. Nebbiolo is also famously fickle and you can't really grow it many other places in the world. Really? Yeah, it's just well suited to this particular part of Italy. I thought there was nothing that Washington State couldn't grow. There are a handful of producers in the US who grow Nebbiolo. Australia, you'll find some Nebbiolo. Interesting. But yeah, the Piedmont, it's really, really a home body. It doesn't want to go anywhere else. So like Italian people, it's not interested in culture or food outside its own area. Right, because there are no Italian-American immigrants. They never left. So you had mentioned the previous wine had a big cherry note. This I feel is even more pronounced. The cherry character here is bonkers. It reminds me of like a Belgian Creek lambic. Like it's really interesting. They're really leaning into the fruit in this. You know, the classic profile for Nebbiolo is often cherries, strawberries, rose petal. So look for floral notes. And often people refer to tar, a kind of dark, savory, slightly bitter edge to it. So roses, cherries, tar. Underripe strawberry. Yeah. Yeah, strawberry for sure. But this is, I think, is really just a fun wine. Easy drinking for weeknight. Again, totally versatile with food. So be great with like some camembert, brie. Yeah. You know, there are traditional cheeses in the area. There's something called Robiola, which is kind of a mild, usually goat-smelt cheese that is soft-ripened like those cheeses that would work really well with this. There's also a town called Bra nearby. B-R-A. What up, Bra? There's a famous cheese from there as well. Cow's milk can be soft or ripened to a harder state. That would be good with some of the bigger wines. Gorgonzola is from this area. So there's a lot of cheese options. Also, we would be remiss if we didn't say that this is the famous area for white truffles. Tartufo d'Alba. So Nebbiolo, great affinity for white truffle dishes. There are other famous dishes. Oh, you truffle boys. You don't like truffles, Raj? I can't say that I haven't had many opportunities to enjoy truffles. They're not. We need to get you on the liquor side of the business, apparently. The beer industry, famously cheap. Not exactly treating us to dinners that include truffles, all that often. How about a little risotto? Yeah. That's a very classic pairing as well because it'll just cut through all that heaviness. Well, in fact, in this area, they make something called risotto al la Barolo. Often, risotto is made with a splash of white wine at the beginning of the cooking process. You saute your aromatics and your rice and then you hit it with some wine and that absorbs into the rice. Well, here they use red wine. They use Barolo or Nebbiolo and the resulting risotto is of course really red and delicious. Interesting. There's also a dish here called Brassato al Barolo, which is basically braised meat in Barolo. You can think of it kind of like beef bourguignon. Nice. And there are famous Piedmontese cattle too that may have great steaks and whatnot. Lots of options. Porcini mushrooms in the area too. Also great. Not inexpensive, but not... Seasonally, of course. Nosebleed prices of truffles. Not truffle pricing. Maybe a little gnocchi. Yeah, sure. So anyway, fruity, exuberant, fun. Good entry level Nebbiolo. If you don't want it, if you've never had it before, this is a great place to start without plunking down the box for Barberasco or Barolo. At least you know what you're getting yourself into without spending 50 bucks. We're going to move on to another Nebbiolo d'Alba, or actually that one, last one was Langhe. This is more specific. It's from the Alba region, where you see Dolcetto and Barbera widely grown. This is from an old school traditionalist Bruno Giacosa, one of the truly great producers. That doesn't sound like a real Italian name. Bruno Giacosa? Well, you know, his daughter has taken over Winery. He died, I don't know, six years ago or something. Her name is Bruna. Isn't it? Anyway, this is 2020 Nebbiolo d'Alba. This should be a little more traditional. You should see more of that bricking that you would expect. How can they call it Nebbiolo instead of Barbera? Because- Or instead of, no, sorry, instead of the other one, Barbaresco. Right, because, well, interestingly- The other one. Dude, I'm getting my barbs confused. He just waved his hand. That was appropriate. Giacosa actually started in Barbaresco and probably some of these grapes are from that region. However- So it's just, it's just a regional thing. Like I said, you might declassify grapes if they're from younger vines. But this is all peat mod, though. Yeah. Yeah, so this is grown, I mean, yes. This theoretically may be, it's aged for a shorter time. There are a lot of reasons that you couldn't call it Barbaresco or Barolo. Okay, it is brickier in color, though. Yeah, but surprisingly, some wineries might make a wine that qualifies for that, but they still, if it's their entry level, they still might call it Nebbiolo, rather than use that name and sell it at a lower price. So a winery could make a Nebbiolo, a Barbaresco, and a Barolo, all from Nebbiolo grapes. The difference there is aging time. Right, and a lot do, Giacosa does, for sure. Started in Barbaresco, moved famously to making Barolos from great single vineyards, what are now known as MGA's for the last 14 years or so. This is an interesting wine. This is much more just like light and elegant. It balances out the fruit more, but there's almost like a bitterness on the back end that I get. Could it be tar? Yeah, probably. Yeah, we're definitely in the tar realm here. Very savory, maybe like a little iodine. Roger, the tar realm was your first Dungeons and Dragons campaign, yeah? D&D too theatrical for my taste. Again, the color here, all these wines have been like stunning to look at. And I feel like the garnet coloration to this is really striking. Yeah, well, tip your glass a little. So it's garnet at the core, but fading to tawny. Yeah, and then it gets super bright. That's really interesting. They are beautiful wines. There's no doubt about it. They're aromatically complex. They're beautiful to the eye. And I think this is gorgeous. I think everybody probably has noticed that we've really amped up the structure here. Yeah. A lot more tannin. Way less just the other ones have been telegraphing the fruit, whereas this is more subdued. This has tannic balance. I think all the fruit's still there. There's just so much other stuff going on. It seems like the fruit's muted. Yeah. But in reality, we've amped up the backend. Exactly. Yeah. I really like this. That means it's probably expensive. Did we just go way up in price? So yes. Last one was $14.99. I mean, this is literally one of the most legendary producers in the area. They have good taste. $36.99. That is not reasonable. What is this one again? This is Bruno Giacosa Nebbiolo d'Alba 2020. That's really good. It's paradoxically light. I mean, yeah, right. That's what I'm saying by elegant. It's light on its feet. I want to call it delicate, but there's way too much tannin in the back end to say delicate. I'm not sure what to think of this. It's almost like a weirdly tannic Pinot noir. Exactly. So you're kind of hitting the hallmarks of this variety and this area on the head. It's a combination of ridiculous power and finesse and elegance, and a lot of people do compare it to Burgundy. That's what the Scouting Report had on Ray, by the way. Yeah. Finesse, elegance. Well, break out. Ridiculous power. Break out your thesaurus because this is where the word ethereal comes in. Yeah, that's a great one. It is indeed ethereal. This is a Ferrari of a wine. Power and finesse. Indeed. Hand built. For under 40 bucks. Yeah, there you go. This is the other thing. You know, Ferrari's, Lamborghini's, handmade cars, right? Craftsmanship like a Bruno Mali loafer or something. Hand harvesting, you know, sustainable vineyard. Everything's done by hand. Everything's kind of old school, really hands on winemaking. But also in the finest tradition of traditional wines, hands off winemaking at the same time. You know, it's not a lot of manipulation. It's just the beauty of the. Yeah, this is this is a great wine. Hands off Brophy's loafers. And now we probably need some asobuco with something like this. Yeah. Yeah. This is getting into the territory where you really need something meaty, a lot of protein, a little fat for the tannin. Absolutely. The tannin is pretty integrated, though. I mean, as much as it's I feel we've tasted prominent, more prominent, but it's not out of balance. Yeah. And it's really finely textured. This is not coarse tannin. It's very, very fine. I'm usually, you know me, I don't like... Complaining. When tannin is at the forefront, I can't handle it. Yeah, tannin management is a very important thing here. We're going to move on to Barolo proper now. And all, we've got three Barolos. They're all going to be from the 2019 vintage. Yes, it would be exactly that. So as we- That's my Italian expertise at play there, Roger. Plural in Italian. Generally, you're ending up with an I rather. He's going around correcting people and they say Biscotti or Biscotto. How many are you going to have? I only see you holding one. Okay, so 2019 Piedmont wines was kind of the thrust of my idea to begin with. But when I got on the floor, I ended up choosing just a handful of the earlier releases from really good producers that pretty much knock it out of the park in a good vintage. You don't have to worry about having trouble with these guys. This is Silvio Grasso. Now as opposed to a lot of- All these made up Italian names, man. Silvio Grasso. This one goes back to 1927, another old winery. So there are 11 villages in Barolo, including the village of Barolo. The place that they come from will actually inform the way they taste. The soils are different, the aspects are different, the elevation is different. And La Mora is where Silvio Grasso is located. And that tends to give you some power and grace and finesse, all at the same time, usually a little bit earlier drinking than some other areas. And Grasso is leaning toward the modern style, although you can see this is pretty bricky in color. They do use barriques to some extent. It's not like Napa Valley, where you get a hundred percent new oak barrel. At the most you're looking at 20, 30% new oak here. This is way softer than I thought it was gonna be. What vintage is this? 2019. So just released 2019, and this is a testament to the more modern approach. Modern Barolo's tend to be, this one straddles the line for sure, but they tend to be darker in color. People get more extract, but less tannin, and often they are softened by a spell in new French oak. Here I think we've got kind of something straddling the line. And there's been a movement of producers going away from the more modern style and being more traditional. Even guys like, once upon a time, both Grasso and Scavino were probably ultra-modernists. Right. But that's not the case anymore. While they still have some of that, the next generation has also taken over, I think, at both places, I believe. Yeah, absolutely. Those kids, they all went to wine school, whereas their parents probably didn't. And they've probably also worked in other places in the world. So they get exposed to more things and they bring those ideas back. And it's kind of what's old is new again. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. There was a strong movement in the 80s to be like, we're going to incorporate a lot of new woke and take techniques from the French and whatever. And then there's a big backlash against it. And interestingly, for as famous as we think Barolo is, the history, like I'm talking about these wineries that started in the 20s and stuff, people around the world did not know what Barolo was or drink Barolo. And the style was totally different. A lot of times there's residual sugar. They're really, really super rustic. And that's kind of what the modernists were rebelling against. The Barolos had become pretty austere, very oxidized. They were of course great producers, but people wanted to make them fresher and more like wines of the world. But now with modern wine techniques, harkening backward though, so really managing everything really well in a modern way, but using all the old school equipment and everything, the large old oak barrels and whatnot, we get fresher, less rustic, more fruit expressive wines that have better managed tannins. They're not the mouth searing tannins that they used to have, which you literally had to age, Barolo, or it was just a mouth puckering tannin fest if you drink it young. And the weather's just warmer. So what they're working with now is vastly different than 20 years ago even. Yeah, I mean, we say this almost every wine podcast we do. The climate is changing people, and the people who are most attuned, a lot of the people who are most attuned are winemakers because it's really changing what they have to do. And it even is changing which vineyard sites are better. If you have a south or a southeast exposure, you know, that might have been the greatest place in the world because you got a lot of sun. Now you might want a little bit of a northern aspect in some places to protect it from the sun. There's going to be apartments built on Tocallan and Noctua. We need to talk more about how this wine tastes because I think it's pretty phenomenal. What's this wine cost? Again, we are working with some really great pricing here. You're not even going to believe this. Normally $33.99, $29.99. Get out of here. This wine is $30. Great quality. Pass it back over. So this is the thing that people should know about Barolo is yes, you can walk into a Binny's and go into the cellar and drop $300 or $200 on a bottle of single vineyard Barolo that will age longer than your kids will live. But a lot of the entry level stuff right now, it's in the 30 to 60 range. And the wine quality is excellent. So are these one of the, would you say this is one of the styles then that is most famous for people laying it down? Oh yeah. I mean, yeah. You know, traditionally you'd really literally have a choice unless you just wanted to rip your mouth apart with tannic structure. Well, one of the things with Barolo is it has both tannin and acid. So those are the two key aging requirements for long live wines. And yeah, these wines typically can age decade or two. No problem. This is really interesting. I think maybe you said that this sees some oak, right? I mean, there's a dessert spice character to this that I'm thinking, you know, has to be the oak that is amazing. Yeah, certainly, you know, French oak, famously a lot of vanilla, a lot of nutmeg, baking spices, that kind of thing. So no surprise there. I'm getting kind of a cinnamon thing going. Cinnamon, interestingly, cinnamon often crops up in Nebbiolo, but also in Burgundy, I think is very common. And it's just another thing that kind of bridges the gap between these two. If you are a fan of traditional Burgundy, you should, and you don't know Piedmont wines, you should think about it. And you're gonna get, for $30, this is a lot of wine, which is hard to do in Burgundy for, or basically any Pinot noir for 30 bucks. Agreed, this is a tough trick. Lot of wine for 30 bucks, no doubt. Bringing up Lambic again, I feel like this is a Lambic drinker's wine, with that sweet spice reminds me of some of the best Creeks that use the cherries with the pits, and the acidity, you're right, you can tell, it's there. This is a really interesting, really interesting wine. Tannen is there, but again, it's really enjoyable now. How do you think it would pair with a Pearson salted nut roll? I'll do one way to find out. Anyway, wow, I'm taking a picture of this one. Roger, I am so happy you're liking these. I didn't think this would necessarily be in your wheelhouse, but I love that you like them. Yeah, I'm usually, again, steer so clear at tannen is not my jam, but. But when they're so refined, I mean, this is the magic of modern Barolo. Even modern traditional Barolo is the tannen management. Modest at best pairing with a nut roll for the record. Get that risotto with a little shaved white. Yeah, there's not enough fat in your nut roll, unfortunately. You know what's interesting? I keep meaning to ask this. It's interesting how the Necker's have like a DOC. They're coded. They have a little QR code as well. Yeah. I mean, like most of Europe, Italy is very serious, or the EU is serious about making sure their wines are authentic. Barolo is a DOCG. Denominazione di origin controllata e garantita. So it's guaranteed unlike the other ones? Yes. DOC is theoretically one step below that. It's geographically controlled. The grape varieties are controlled. This technically is a higher level. So here we have GD. Vyra. This is their entry-level Barolo, and it's called Alba, not with an A, but an E, which means sunrise, rather than being a reference to white. By the way, a lot of the soils in this area, I have a lot of limestone or calcareous clay. Another thing that kind of bonds it to burgundy, limestone being very alkaline, tends to promote high acidity in the grapes in the end. So if you think about famous places with chalky or limestone soils, you've got burgundy, champagne, Sancerre, and here you have that too. So GD Vira, again, 2019. Very, very aromatic. Super expressive. Really floral. So this is another winery that I think straddles line between traditional and modern. More ruby in color than the last one. Yeah. Interestingly, you still see the tawny tint to it. This gets a really long, almost traditional maceration and they do it in several different sized vessels going all the way up to a traditional like 600 liter of boaty. But it sees such a long time, depending on the size of the vessel they put it in, it's anywhere from 27 to 57 days. So can you imagine this 57 days sitting on the skin? That's why you can extract loads and loads of tannin. Holy cow. Yeah. That's long. Then the tannin is definitely more pronounced. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's that long maceration. Then it sees 26 months in Slovenian boaty and no barrique here unlike the Silvio Grasso. So it should be a little less tamed at this point, I think. This is aggressive. This is a boisterous wine. This seems like it needs time. Will this blow off if we just decanted it for eight hours or does this need a couple of years? Well, it does need time in the bottle or a couple of days in the dehanter, in my opinion. I mean, there's a lot of tannin here. It's wound up pretty tight, but there's still some pretty generous fruit here too. It's not all tannin and it's not completely austere. This was just released and I think it's still pretty expressive for how young it really is. And when you hear the price point, I think you'll really like this wine a lot. You know what else you should think about? And I think we've had it on the podcast before. These guys have entry-level wines, a broad Piedmont blend that has a bunch of different grapes in it and Barbera. And they're like, I don't know, 12 bucks, 13 bucks. And they're really great. This is only $34.99. And it's a lot of wine for that. You could definitely lay this down for a long time if you are opening it now like we did. Definitely decant it. And vintage in and vintage out. This is generally one of the best buys in Barolo that we have on our shelves. And like every vintage, I have no problem recommending this at all. And expressive of the vintages that comes from it, which is really, I think, the true hallmark of really great wine making is to express what nature gives you and that's what, for Chris and myself, I think, that makes wine so interesting because it Yeah, I would say that this is something that maybe most Americans don't get, but great winemakers, like Ray says, lean into what nature has given them. Yeah. If they've got a light year, they know what to do. Shorter masturbation. If they've got a big hot year, they know what to do. And you lean into it and you manage it according to whatever that vintage has given you. And you shouldn't, in my opinion, look at vintage charts and go, oh, you know, this is a great year. I'm only buying that. If you want to know what a winery can do, buy multiple vintages and understand what this vineyard is, literally the vineyard site, what it gives you and how good they can be in years that are not great. And a lot of times people buy the great years and they're so big and powerful they open them up young and they're like, I don't even get this. What is happening here? And sometimes in the lighter vintages or they're younger drinking and they can be absolutely beautiful expressions. They're just not the massive powerhouses that get all the attention. And this is the first time I'm having the 19. Me too. And it's what I would expect a 19 to be like just profile wise because it is such a big ripe vintage. I mean, it's definitely about power and this does not shy away from that at all. Yeah. Just in case we glossed over this, I was looking at 19s because it is a highly rated powerhouse vintage and I was expecting some pretty, pretty wound up wines at this point. The Scavino was, I mean, the Grasso was a little bit of a surprise in how supple it was. Yeah, that was a little more dialed back than I was expecting. The aroma on this is breathtaking. I mean, it's like the lilac characters would get from it, but I mean, you just keep revisiting it, and it's so beautifully floral in a just astounding way, like not in a perfumed floral like that can be off putting to people, but it's just, I don't know. That's the highlight for me with this is the bouquet is just off the charts. I agree. Totally compelling already. There will be layers of more exciting things when this ages. I would love to see this 10 years, 15 years down the road and see what it smells like. What an easy experiment. For you for $35. Like anyone who's listening to this and is even marginally interested in wine, buy a couple bottles of this and just forget about them for five to 10 years. Yep. I always recommend people buy three of something they really like because you know, you might drink a lot of people want to kick the tires right away and then you know, and then you've got two more to play around with. Even from my earliest days of buying wine, I followed that rule, honestly, and it's why we have Ancient Wine Friday today. Anyway, gorgeous, great producer, beautiful. Am not particularly familiar with. It's unlike a lot of these people, really, really pretty new on the scene. This is Broccardo, and it actually comes from a single vineyard site, Bricco San Pietro. It's also a 2019. These guys only literally only started bottling wines in 2009, although they have a family history of grape growing, only going back to like the 1970s. This is from the area known as Manfarato, and this would be what you would call an MGA in the modern terminology or a crew, a single vineyard site. So again, not unlike Burgundy, which has crewed themselves to death by parsing everything up into tiny little vineyard plots, even little plots within named vineyards or Grand Cru vineyards or Premier Crew vineyards, Barolo is just starting on this journey. You know, we've got the broad 11 villages and then they're they're like almost 200 single vineyard sites and they're called Mencioni Geografica Adjunctiva. So an added geographical description. It's not a Grand Cru type hierarchy system, but it's probably the beginning of that. Interesting. What the French would call a L'Ude. Yes. This wine tastes like it's ready to go. Well, let me see. Much more prominent kind of cherry and fruit character on this. Yeah. I mean, after that last one, I feel like the tannin seem much less pronounced and their fruit is more expressive. Interesting because this area is known as a kind of a powerful tannin area. One place we didn't get to is Saralunga, which also makes just like super grippy, bold styles for broad regional Barolo often that this area and Saralunga form the structure of multi-region Barolos. I think there's a lot of tannin here. I think it's pretty. It's got some grip to it for sure. Suck on it a little bit and just. Acidity is here too. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know why I feel like this isn't as tannic as the others. I think it's there. I think it's doing a good job of drying out the pallet here. But again, super fine. What we haven't found at all and what we shouldn't expect to find anymore for most producers is rusticity. Very refined tannin. Very, very, very fine grained. And you can see, again, we have that kind of bricked tawny color. Another pretty amazing bouquet here. A little bit floral, but herbal as well. I really like the nose on this as well. These are definitely wines you can kind of meditate on. They will change in the glass. Even, you know, you pour it, you start smelling it. When you're halfway through the bottle or your glass, you're picking up different nuances, different things. And that definitely is a mark of a very complex and excellent wine. Yeah. If your wine's not getting better over the course of two hours, then that's probably not the best wine in the world. If you like, you know, having a nice long meal, that's a great thing about wine is that it does always change. And that's what makes it interesting, I think. Yeah. That's good to know too, because I think some people are starting to get a little too paranoid with, you know, like, maybe we've done too much of a job of like, you know, with all the different, you know, ways to reseal a bottle or, you know, aerate it prior. It's just like making people think, you know, the thing's going to deteriorate instantaneously. Couldn't possibly drink a bottle the next day. Wine is actually a lot hardier than most people give it credit for. One of the best ways to preserve an open bottle of wine is to freeze it. Which people are like, no, you can't freeze wine. Yeah. Really? Yeah. But yeah, if you hit like you're going on vacation, you drink half a bottle of wine. Just throw it in your in your freezer. And what? You can definitely do this. Yeah. I wouldn't do it with like old burgundy or something. You know, just a bottle of basic Sauvignon Blanc, say it'll lose a little of its acidity once it comes back to room temperature, but it'll be perfectly fine. Say I've got a bottle of some 60 ish dollar Napa cab open and I drink half of it and we're leaving the next day. Could I freeze that and it'd be OK? Absolutely. Yeah. Holy s**t. Say you're going away for a weekend, depending on the vintage and how young it is, you might come back on Monday and go, damn, this wine is even better than when we left. So we obviously need to open six of the same bottles, you know, pour off exactly the same ounces, reseal them with whatever methods we have. The Vacuvin, the, you know, the neutral air thing. The Vacuvin is by far my least favorite. Really? The freezing. The Argonne, the Gasworks. Yeah. Yeah. Non-reactive gas is probably the best. Yeah. Your biggest enemy is oxygen, obviously. It's also your biggest friend in the short term. So you want your wine exposed, generally speaking, to oxygen, unless it's super old and delicate. Certainly young wines benefit from being exposed to oxygen. But then if you want to preserve it, you want to keep the oxygen away. And the cooler you keep it, of course, as we know, chemical reactions slow down at cooler temperatures. So refrigeration and the extreme version. And also the number one mistake people make when they put their wine in the refrigerator is they put it in the door, which is the warmest part. If you're going to do it, put it in the back if you want for it to last for, you know, two, three days. You know, the other benefit of doing that is if it's a red wine, so many people drink their reds a little too warm. So take it out of the fridge, let it sit for a while and then try it when it's hitting about cellar temperature. Yeah, fifty five, then try it when it hits sixty and with a big wine like this, maybe sixty five. But if your room is seventy or seventy five, alcohol is going to pop out. It's going to sometimes seem disjointed. It will not be the focused and pleasurable experience you'd have if you were drinking it at sixty degrees. So room temperature, old saw, not always accurate. Well, there's this maxim in the wine industry that everyone drinks their reds too warm and their whites too cold. It's pretty true. I believe that for sure. Yeah, like you have a big Chardonnay like the Plump Jack we had last week, you know, if that's 40 degrees, it's way too cold for it. Yeah, yeah. I actually thought it was at the perfect temperature, which was just slightly beneath room temperature. It was not at Bud Light temperature. Yeah, I mean, the bottoms weren't blue. I think white burgundy, Chardonnay. Is my wine cold? I can't tell. If I pull a... I need a visual aid for this temperature. If I pull a bold white wine out of the cellar and it's around 55, I am very happy with that temperature. Not 40. Nice. That's a really interesting lineup. You scared me initially talking about that it was going to be a tannin onslaught, but some nice surprises. The most expensive wine in this whole tasting was what, $35? This is $38.99 on sale for $34.99. Wow. So I don't think we even cracked $35. What was the... Actually, hilariously, Giacosa Nebbiolo d'Alba, not even a Barolo, was $36.99, the most expensive wine in the tasting. But from the iconic producer of Barbera Roscoe. Barbera Roscoe, I mean, it's a true legendary, you know, paradigm setting winery. Exactly. No, those were great. Man. I thought you couldn't touch decent Barolo for like under $75. Yeah. Unfortunately, a lot of people think that, but you walk in with $30, you might walk out with a pretty nice Nebbiolo or three. Rod, you got 30 smackaroos, we're going to hook you up with some Barolo there, bud. That's right. Anyway, I'm really gratified that you guys like this because yeah, it's a new world in this bar. I mean, you know I like adult Italian wine, but for Roger, it's always coin in the air here, whether he's going to react for it or not. I'm on record as not being, I don't have enough experience with red wine in general and it's not always my jam. Yet you're recognizing quality without any problem. Yeah, it's true. And these wines are the types of wines that get better if you have them with food, and that's really what they're designed to go with. The best way to learn about wine is to have them with your meal, because you'll learn more about it that way than listening to us or reading a blog post or what have you. 100%. Most traditional European areas, wine is part of the table. It's part of the meal. It is not meant for... French middle schools, for example. Yeah. Like you go to a French middle school, you've got some local woman cooking you Blanc Quai Du Vau. So why not have some wine? Americans love wines that you can sit on the couch and sip, and they're what people might think of as complete on their own. Couch comforters. Yeah. Because they're big and plush, and they're easy, and there's no challenge. But here we have acid, tannin, structure, and also beautiful layers of flavor. And when you put that up against food, a lot of the stuff will change. The tannins will drop off against fat and protein. So that's a good reason to have them. The acidity will cut through fat. The other flavors, when the tannin drops back, will pop up. So you'll get more fruit, more nuance, more interesting things going on in the mouth. And if you like interesting things going on in your mouth. And who doesn't? Make sure you like and subscribe to Barrel to Bottle, the Binny's Podcast. Excellent line up there, Chris. This was a fun, albeit at times a touch confusing with the overlap in how these. It was all Brophy. A lot of similar sounding words. But Jim in the write up will help all of you with direct links to each of these wines. But yeah, well done. This is a fun line up to taste through. Thanks a lot, Chris. Enjoy these wines with foods, listeners. A fail on our part today considering our long history of various encased meats on this podcast. Dude, if I had any idea we were doing this today, I would definitely have brought food. I threw this together like an hour before we started. Well, it was a hell of a line up considering that. Listeners, do us a favor, give us a review on Apple podcasts, tell your friends about the show. We will see you next week. Until then, I'm Pat. I'm Roger. I'm Ray. And I'm Chris. Keep Tasty.