Barbera’s climb to become “the people’s wine”

Food-friendly, plenty of zip, and rounded off with some spice. It’s simple how barbera, in the words of Cole Porter, “would be so easy to love.”

Barbera’s popularity is perhaps as much owed to its casting as “the people’s wine” – unpretentious, approachable, and easy-going – as the changes in vineyard and cellar techniques that have improved the wine’s quality.

Wine is all about context, and if barbera is to be democratic, it’s because relative varietals have been made regal.

In barbara’s case, against the landscape of the Langhe hills of Piemonte in northwest Italy, it’s noble nebbiolo that reigns.

Nebbiolo is the varietal that makes Piemonte’s, and some of Italy’s, most prestigious wines of Barolo and Barbaresco.  

Records for nebbiolo in Piemonte go back to the 13th century, and, in the last 800 odd years, the grape has shown itself fiercely loyal to its home turf.

Nebbiolo has not taken kindly to plantings outside Piemonte, let alone outside Italy that would make it an international varietal.

Its stubborn refusal to grow elsewhere – even nebbiolo’s reputation as highly sensitive to location within the region – is the characteristic that endears it to the Piemontese.

The varietal is the soul of the region precisely because it cannot belong anywhere else.

Barbera, on the other hand, has a heartiness that first led to it being planted extensively within Piemonte and throughout the country. Today, it also acts as something of an Italian ambassador.

Within Europe, barbera’s grown in the Primorska region of Slovenia right off Italy’s far eastern border. Barbara’s natural acidity gives it a heat tolerance for the warmer New World climates of California, Argentina, Australia, and South Africa.

Though barbara has been found as not genetically linked to other Piemonte varietals, its story  and transformation are set within its Piemonte tradition.

Barbera’s turn from “too common to inspire respect” to “Piemonte’s second most glamorous red grape,” as Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson put it in The World Atlas of Wine (7th edition) followed a renaissance that first rejuvenated nebbiolo in global opinion.

Rooting for the Underdog

Two principle traits of barbera are its highly acidic grape and its highly vigorous vine.

Traditional vineyard and cellar practices, which had evolved to preserve the best resources for nebbiolo, were at odds with these main features of barbera and acted to offset rather than enhance the wine.

Beginning in the vineyard, it is not enough to say that prime plots were reserved for nebbiolo.

That would reduce the matter to simply a practical one of real estate management.

The vignaioli of the Langhe are widely characterized for their attention to detail in viewing each vineyard as the sum of all its parts and their devotion to believing wine should be the full expression of its land.

This fascination is perhaps a natural consequence of trying to grow the sensitive nebbiolo within a landscape of rolling hills that creates a multitude of variances.

A history of laws requiring equal inheritance served to further instill the mindset. Property that was subdivided over generations created ever-smaller parcels that put higher and higher premiums on the most-prized locations.

Long before the shelves-worth of available wine encyclopedias, Piemonte carried on an oral tradition on the best sites for Barolo and Barbaresco, as Alessandro Masnaghetti points out.

Masnaghetti’s Barolo Menzioni Geografiche Aggiuntive (MGA): L’Enciclopedia delle Grandi Vigne del Barolo (2015) cites and builds on the work of modern pioneer Renato Ratti, whose personal research and mapping alongside his own winemaking beginning in the 1960s included designating “first category” and “historical location” in Barolo.

Throughout most of this regional legacy to identify and debate top sites, barbera – the varietal that had shown itself able to grow anywhere – inspired little notice. 

A Challenge to Conventional Wisdom

By and large treated as an afterthought until the mid-1980s, it was often remarkable that barbera could turn out as well as it did, Karen MacNeil notes in The Wine Bible (2001).

Pierguido Busso, of the family-owned Piero Busso, located in Neive of the Barbaresco zone, has been around long enough to remember when barbera’s reputation changed from being the stuff of bulk wine to something of significance.

Pierguido’s grandfather Guido founded the vineyard in 1953. His father produced the first wine using the family’s name on the label in 1979.

The lineage makes Pierguido, alongside sister Emanuela, the third generation of growers and second generation of winemakers. Both their father, Piero, and mother, Lucia, continue to be active, making for a full family venture that encompasses everything from the vineyard to harvest and winemaking to sales.

Today, the 10 hectares and production of Piero Busso includes the single-vineyard bottling of barbera from S. Stefanetto, a 1.5-hectare site with 25- to 50-year old vines.

The family stopped buying new vines in the early 2000s, Pierguido explained on a visit and tasting in 2016.

Older vines, supported by a deeper, more extensive root system, are more resilient to climate change, he added.

The extra care, resources, and attention to detail of single-vineyard bottling underscores just how far barbera has come in esteem.

A focus on single-vineyard production – a way of designating wine as the sole expression of grapes from particular parcel – was novel even for the revered nebbiolo until the modernizing movement of the 1960s. 

Historically, production within Piemonte had been dominated by a negoçiant system, with merchant houses buying grapes from different vineyards and producing the wine under their own labels.

Part of the revolution of the 1960s Piemonte wine scene was the shift toward single-vineyard – cru for the French, sorì or bricco for the Piemontese – and the rise of the grower-producer.  

Other changes from the era’s new class of winemakers included introducing technology like temperature control during fermentation.

The goal of these efforts was to honor the best that nebbiolo had to offer while making the most of techniques that could retain elements of fruit and freshness to meet the day’s evolving tastes and preferences.

Burton Anderson, in The Wine Atlas of Italy: A traveller’s guide, describes how this pursuit led the era’s new guard of winemakers to question the conventional wisdom over the optimal conditions for nebbiolo.

Tradition upheld the hillsides where the snow melted first and promised the greatest sun exposure as the premium locations.

However, as Anderson notes, cooler sites that could support more time on the vine for nebbiolo through a slower, longer ripening process were better aligned with the focus of modernizing winemakers to preserve more fruit and aroma.  

This change in thinking around nebbiolo opened opportunities for barbera.

The Ripe Stuff

As it had been barbera’s historical lot to give way to nebbiolo, it was often planted in areas considered too cool or without enough sun exposure for nebbiolo.

Furthermore, barbera was often picked on the early side, completing its harvest ahead of nebbiolo’s.

Though nebbiolo is itself a late-ripening varietal, the natural acidity of barbera means that it benefits from a longer time on the vine than tradition allowed.

The combination of cooler sites with a rushed harvest made for a one-two punch to barbera, creating underripe conditions that accented the already naturally acidic grape for wines of an even sharper edge and more bite.

Barbera’s acidity is one of the things helping it to thrive in warmer New World climates.

James Suckling notes how barbera is left with plenty of acidity, even after it has spent extended time on the vine, to undercut the higher levels of alcohol that are the tradeoff to a longer ripening process the increases the available sugar content that can be converted to alcohol during fermentation.

The result of a longer sunbathe for barbera has been wines that are deeper and richer in flavor with plenty of zing to keep them highly sippable.

In the case of Piemonte, it turned out to be a happy win-win that a new approach for Barolo and Barbaresco, calling for cooler conditions for nebbiolo, happened around the time that some producers, like Ratti, started to reevaluate barbera’s potential, leading them to a search for better conditions for the varietal and that meant seeking warmer climes.

Turning Moment

In addition to a move to more favorable conditions, barbera benefitted from efforts to reduce yields, concentrating the vines into producing fewer but more developed and flavorful grape bunches.

Yields are managed through winter pruning. For a highly vigorous vine like barbera, pruning is even more intensive work to cut back shoots and focus the plant on fruit growth.

In this regard, the very heartiness of barbera that fits its rugged, self-sufficient personae makes it rather high-maintenance for the vignaioli.

Improved vineyard treatment for barbera was spurred on by the startling success of Barolo and Barbaresco in the 1980s, as the renovated style for Piemonte’s star wines that had begun in the 1960s finally resonated.

Renewed acclaim for Barolo and Barbaresco spotlighted the region, and the higher prices that the bottles could now command generated a new capital flow that could be directed toward expanding other resources.  

Barbera, which traditionally would not have merited the expense of things like the costs of new barrels for oak aging, single varietal vinification, or marketing outside Piemonte, got a boost.

Suckling credits Michele Chiarlo in Asti in the 1970s as one of the first producers to give barbera the recognition of a varietal wine.

He notes how Chiarlo introduced malolactic fermentation, which converts tart malic acid into softer lactic acid. It was another step to help curb the harsher elements of barbera’s acidity that had been previously passed over in the grape’s days a bulk or blending wine.

Though leaders like Ratti, who was central to relocating barbera, and Chiarlo, with renovated cellar techniques, helped pave the way for barbera, the wine’s ugly-duckling-to-swan moment came with Giacomo Bologna and his 1986 dell’Uccellone.

The wine showcased barbera with new oak aging, adding spice dimension and structure through the barrel’s tannins, and sealed barbera’s reputation as a wine of note.

At Piero Busso, smaller barrels are used on barbera than Barbaresco, increasing the amount of surface contact the wine has for a greater oak influence.

Still, no treatment from the cellar can replace the attention given in the vineyard.

The day before the tasting, Pierguido had been in the vineyards all night to remove noctua, a new pest that lives as a worm for two days, feasting at night, before building its cocoon and living as a butterfly for 12 hours.

Winemaking at Piero Busso has long been guided by a natural, sustainable approach without herbicides or pesticides. Most of the work in the vineyard is done by hand.

“The winemaker for the winery is like the doctor for the people,” said Pierguido.