Renato Ratti

​We continued our wine exploration on the mainland, visiting six more wineries – two known for their Barolo, two known for their Brunello, and two known for their Sagrantino.  Our first stop was in the Piedmont region of Italy, at the mountain town of Alba.  Alba is famous for two things – Barolo wine, and white truffles.
For those of you unfamiliar with Barolo, it is made from Nebbiolo grapes grown on the south-facing slopes near the town of Barolo.  The Nebbiolo grape is also used to make Barbaresco (near the town of Barbaresco) and – surprise! – Nebbiolo.
Now to produce Barolo you must 1) have the grapes grown in the Barolo DOCG region and 2) follow the Barolo DOCG rules.  So how does Barolo differ from Nebbiolo?  Is it just better grapes?  The answer lies in the fermentation process.
Italian Nebbiolo wines are fermented in more or less the standard method.  The grapes are crushed and the combination of grape juice, grape pulp, skins, seeds, and sometimes stems are fermented together.  This combination is called the ‘must,’ as in you ‘must’ ferment this mix to get red wine.  Anyway, the normal process is to press the must after all the sugar has been converted to alcohol by the yeast.  This takes one to two weeks, depending on such variables as fermentation temperature, yeast, and sugar content of the grapes.  To make Barolo, however, the must remains unpressed for a minimum of four weeks to extract every bit of tannin from the grapes as well as a wide variety of other chemicals either from the grapes themselves or produced by the yeast.

​Our first winery in Alba was Renato Ratti.  The view from the winery is shown in the picture above.  A relatively new, modern facility, we had a large room all to ourselves with an absolutely wonderful server.  He set us up to taste three wines.  The first was a Nebbiolo, i.e., a wine made using the common process of pressing the must when the fermentation was complete.  The second was a similarly-aged Barolo, again made by pressing the must at least four weeks after starting fermentation.  The third wine was the same as the second but a much older vintage – 2005 versus 2020.  It was a truly remarkable wine, smooth but quite complex – and a bit outside my price range.

​As for the truffles, we did not participate in a truffle hunt but we did ingest some.  For lunch we had fresh truffle on a dish of pasta.  5 euros per ounce with a minimum of 6 ounces.  Expensive lunch….