From: Piedmont, Italy
Varietal: Barbera
Taste and Critical Acclaim: Aromas of dark cherry, slate, hints of licorice and spice, and a lavender floral lift. You’ll find more layers of fruit, floral, licorice, cocoa, and spice notes on the wine’s medium-bodied palate and clean, bright finish. A powerful wine, but not monolithic, deep without saturation. Its expressive energy is revealed in its nuances, the floral hints, the vibrations of juicy fruit, in the warmth it holds. A wine meant for the table!
“The 2022 Barbera d'Alba Aves, Burlotto's top Barbera, is a rich, heady wine. Succulent dark cherry, plum, licorice, cloves and lavender open nicely. Medium in body and racy, with gorgeous texture, the 2022 is impeccably balanced. It spent 10 months in 500L barrels, then 2 months in cask prior to bottling.” —Antonio Galloni, Piedmont Report, 92 points
Pairing: This wine will shine alongside a long list of delicious dishes: eggplant parmigiana, pizza, tomato-based sauces, roast white meats, pork chops, braised dishes, duck, goose, and game birds. The acidity will balance fatty foods like pure, creamy cheeses and richer pasta dishes; just don’t overwhelm its delicate nuances with overly spicy dishes or extremely creamy sauces. The following recipe comes from a business that sells American-grown beef from rare Italian-heritage Piedmontese cows that they brought from Italy.
Piedmontese Beef Brasato
by Russ Langstadt, Chef, Wine Country Cooking Studio, Dundee, Oregon
About. Burlotto is the flagship producer from Barolo’s Verduno area. This is a property of enormous historic importance, fabulously delicious wines, and outstanding value.
The Commendatore Giovan Battista Burlotto, one of Barolo's great characters, founded the estate back in 1850. The labels still commemorate the royal house of Savoy’s fondness for Burlotto wines, as well as the winery’s exclusive presence on Duke Luigi Amedeo's 1899 North Pole expedition. The Duke lost two fingers to frostbite, but wrote to the Commendatore a year and a half into the trip that “[t]he wine has been conserved in perfect condition.” G.B. Burlotto was also a pioneer of selling wine in bottle (rather than in cask or demijohn), as well as a champion of a now-rare but still-ravishing grape, Pelaverga Piccolo.
Five generations later, G.B.’s great-great-grandson, Fabio Alessandria, has changed little at the winery, doing some of the crush by foot, fermenting the wine in upright wooden vats, using indigenous yeast and little temperature control.
We love Burlotto wines for their history, but even more for their diversity, their pure fruit, delicate structure, and signature Verduno floral aromatics and spicy palate. The family's single-vineyard Barolos, especially the culty Monvigliero, are some of Piedmont's most lauded wines, critical and collector favorites year-in and year-out. But they continue to make extraordinary wines for Piedmont's more humble grapes (including Dolcetto, Barbera, Preisa, and of course Pelaverga), wines that don't attempt to turn those grapes into Nebbiolo blockbusters but rather that show their unique charms and terroir transparency. The sheer drinkability of these "lesser" wines is is tremendous, and the pricing for such special bottles from such top-rank grower, is shockingly accessible.
About this wine. Aves, produced only in in the top vintages, is a rigorous selection of grapes from Burlotto’s best and oldest Barbera vineyards. Some is sourced from a 0.37 hectare plot of south-facing Barbera vines in the Castagna vineyard. Castagna is located the municipality of Verduno at 340 meters above sea level, and has geological characteristics that are particularly complex, being at the crossroads of different soil matrices (marl of Sant’Agata Fossili, Cassano Spinola formation, gypsum formations). Burlotto’s L’Urdiä vineyard (also in Verduno) is another source for this wine. It’s one of the best Barbera vineyards in the municipality, always expressing precious values of depth, structure, density of flavor and variety of aromas. It’s planted on the “Cassano Spinola” formation, that is, on laminated calcareous marl, faces west and rises up to 360 meters above sea level.
In particular, the interaction between Barbera and this part of the Langa is extraordinary: over time, the wines end up releasing aromas so overtly territorial that they are often mistaken for, before that first sip inevitably reveals its acidity and tannic delicacy, a very elegant Barolo.
The harvest is carried out by hand, in order to preserve the integrity of the fruit and to allow for, when necessary, a selection of the grapes which are then transported to the cellar in 20 kg boxes. The bunches are de-stemmed and the must moved by gravity into open French oak vats where alcoholic fermentation takes place. During the maceration, delicate pumping over and punching down are carried out daily.
Aves undergoes malolactic fermentation and an additional 9 months of maturation in 500 liter wooden barrels followed by subsequent assembly and aging in large barrels. Bottling is usually carried out in the period between the end of August and the beginning of September of the year following the harvest.
