Nebbiolo

So at this point, there were only a few producers working with the wine bocca, which is a historic style of making wine in this area as well.

It's a blend of Nebbiolo, which is the most prominent grape grown in Italy.

We know it for Barolo.

We know it for Barbaresco and another local grape called Vespalina.

will honor it, you know?

Exactly right.

So a lot of winemakers in this region ended up moving further south and focused largely on Nebbiolo.

So it became this kind of uncommon style of winemaking.

It's brilliant with food, right? We know that.

How do you and your team, you know, really build pairings that bridge those regional Southern dishes with classic Italian to ours, like Nebbiolo, for example, or any mineral driven, you know, northern Italian whites.

I mean, this may not be what you want to hear on this pod, but I think that Nebbiolo has become softer and more approachable over the past decade than it ever has been.

So what I often try to tell people outside of a food pairing is that even from some of the top, most expensive producers, a lot of Barolo has never been more approachable when it's younger.

Doesn't mean that it won't age for a very long time.

You know, I think a lot of us have become very comfortable with the notion of seasonal eating, especially with access to farmers markets and, you know, understanding what produce is best when.

But I found, I mean, I could see through full pull that basically our list members were already doing this because we would sell more like Nebbiolo during the season that we're about to enter because people think of it as like autumnal wine and it's going to go with like a good, you know, Chanterelles over polenta or something.

You start, you know, doing all that.

And so I wanted to try to like write that up in book form.

Yeah.

And by Barolo, I do mean Nebbiolo.

But there's just something so... versatile about Nebbiolo that like yeah and it's a thinking wine and that you kind of have to sit with it and like smell it and sniff it and and taste it and like let it breathe in the glass and let it warm up a little bit but there's just something like magical about it that just sings to me every time I have a really good Nebbiolo it's just and probably quite frankly this purely from a like nerdy passion side some like a really great German Riesling um something with like searing acidity maybe a little sweet but like just bright and fresh and um a little kind of unexpected uh right and and I realize I've skewed very European and all of that but um There's so many.

It's okay.

This is such a hard question to answer because there's so much great wine out there.