History
Piemonte's turbulent history, in combination with the physical isolation, held the growth of the winemaking tradition in check for many centuries.
Great wines are made not only in the vineyards and in cellars but also by a receptive market. Accessibility and ease of transport have a major role to play: Bordeaux and Oporto have the natural advantage of their ports while Burgundy and Champagne have long had good roads connecting them with the prosperous market of Paris. The winemakers of the Piemonte had to remain content with serving local demand until the advent of improved roads and political stability in the nineteenth century.
Prehistory to the Romans
The Dark Ages
Medieval Piemonte
Barolo Versus Bordeaux
The 19th Century
20th Century Industrialisation
Prehistory to the Romans
The evidence of flints shows that the Piemonte hills have been populated since the end of the Neolithic era. Systematic vine growing was probably introduced via Liguria by Greek merchants in the fourth and fifth centuries BC but Roman colonization in the first half of the second century BC gave greater shape to wine production. Roman viticulture favoured the high 'Etruscan' training system where vines were supported on low trees or by poles. The Romans built underground cellars for vinification, introduced wooden casks for storage and transportation and planted new vineyards on the clay slopes, which also provided the raw materials for pottery and bricks. Like the earlier Greek version, the Roman wine sold in the markets of Alba and Pollenza was sweet and sticky.
The first sign of the grape is a variety called 'allobrogica' by Pliny the Elder (AD 2.3-79) in his Naturalis Historia. It was grown by the Allobrogicans in northern Piemonte and Pliny describes the fruit as resistant to cold, late-ripening and deeply coloured. The wines were highly rated and even exported to Rome - doubtless the higher acid levels of Nebbiolo grown at northerly latitudes gave a wine with exceptional keeping powers.
Roman rule represented one of the more peaceful interludes in the strife-ridden history of Alba. The town was accepted into the Municipal Federation in 89 BC and from the period when Consul Pompeo Strombone governed Piemonte became known as Alba Pompeia. The onset of Roman decadence was paralleled by the decline of viticulture in the region. Taxes on wine and vineyards were high and the countryside was gradually depopulated.
The Dark Ages
Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the arrival of Charlemagne and the Franks in the ninth century, the Langhe and Monferrato Hills were laid waste and Alba destroyed by a series of incursions by temporary landlords such as the Visigoths and the Burgundians. During these so-called Dark Ages, monasteries were the sanctuary of wine culture. The rise of Christianity and the importance of wine as a sacrament saved vineyards from extinction. Under Charlemagne, Piemonte was for once allowed to choose its own form of government. This marked the beginning of a period of fragmentation and feudal rule that lasted longer than anywhere else in Italy, effectively until the French conquest in the eighteenth century. Under the sharecropping mezzadria system, half the wine made by the contadino would be given to his feudal lord.
During the tenth century, Hungarian and then Saracen marauders sacked, raped and pillaged their way across the Piemonte from their strongholds at Frassinetto (La Garde Freinet near Toulon) and the Valle Bormida. The memory of these days is preserved in the hilltop towers (such as at Barbaresco), many of which date from this time, and in the Arabic words which still litter the Piemontese dialect.
Medieval Piemonte
In the medieval period, when Alba was occupied in turn by Provencales, Monferrini, Imperialists, Angioni, Saiuzzei and Visconti, both the evolution and documentation of viticulture are more in evidence. Documents on Piemontese history record the production figures and labour involved in the cultivation of 'nibiol' in Rivoli in 1268. Aromatic varieties such as malvasia and Moscato were introduced and the move away from the Roman high training to a - shorter method of pruning supported by stakes, began. This new system was known as a spanna, a name that in Vercelli became confused with that of the Nebbiolo grape - it is still known as spanna in much of northern Piemonte.
In political terms, the most important dynasty in Piemonte was the Savoy. Their influence was first felt in the Langhe in 1531 when they acquired the Duchy of Asti and the Marquisate of Ceva and began to occupy and dispute many other territories. In 1713 Vittorio Amedeo 2nd became king and the Turin-based court of Savoy brought about a period of relative stability until after the formation of the new Republic in 1861.
Barolo Versus Bordeaux
From the seventeenth century onwards the wines of the Piemonte started to become a little more widely available. Early the following century, while their country was at war with France, British wine merchants sought an alternative to red Bordeaux. The wines of Barolo were discovered and considered to fit the bill admirably but, because of poor or nonexistent roads and punitive frontier taxes, it proved impossible to transport the heavy casks of wine to Piemonte's port of Nice. It is tempting to speculate how different Barolo's history might have been with the British as clients. The French themselves were voicing a similar complaint: having recorded his pleasure at drinking wines from Piemonte at the French court, Colbert (minister to Louis XIV) lamented the fact that they were so difficult to obtain.
By the mid-eighteenth century the viticultural pattern evident today began to emerge in the Langhe and Monferrato. Until then a polycultural system had seen vines and other crops cultivated on the same plot. Vines were grown on the plain, without the demand for either quality or quantity there had been little incentive to deforest the hills and turn their more exacting slopes into vineyards. But under the greater commercial freedom of the unified Duchy of Savoy, the promise of new, quality conscious markets like Turin gave rise to the planting of vineyards on the best south-facing hillsides. The vines were often planted in horizontal rows or terraces (rather than the earlier vertical rows), which were easier to work with oxen, and drainage ditches were cut into the hillside to lessen the effects of erosion.
Where sixteenth-century records show 16 per cent of the Bassa Langa and Alto Monferrato under vine, by the mid eighteenth century the figure had risen to 30 per cent. In 1758 Alba issued an edict - the first attempt at DOC type legislation - prohibiting the import and blending of inferior wine from outside the area. Along with the establishment of a banda di vendemmia (an official date before which it was illegal to harvest grapes), this indicates a growing pride and seriousness in the Piemonte attitude to wine.
The 19th Century
Winemaking techniques were also evolving. By the first half of the nineteenth century the first attempts were being made to vinify Nebbiolo and Barbera as dry wines. Between 1832 and 1849 the young Count Camillo di Cavour, later the head of the government of Piemonte and allegedly the first person to call himself 'Italian', researched and implemented new agricultural systems on the run-down farms around the family castle at Grinzane and gave local winemakers a spur by employing Louis Oudart, a French enologist from Reims. Cavour had doubts about the potential of Nebbiolo, however, and planted 14 giornate (around 5 hectares) of pinot noir to try and emulate the great Burgundies that were still served at the Savoy court in Turin.
In the 1840s king Carlo Alberto made his own contribution to the modernization of wine, setting up production facilities at his newly purchased Verduno estate under the control of General Staglieno, who had worked with Oudart at Grinzane. Staglieno made innovations in the cellar, introducing closed-vat fermentation and improving the use of sulphur dioxide. In the second half of the century most of the big companies involved with the production of vermouth and Asti Spumante grew up around Alba and Asti. Martini & Rossi, Gancia and Cinzano were all established in a wave of prosperous industrialization stemming from Piemonte's (and particularly Turin's) leading role in the new Italian Republic. By the turn of the century the main production centre for Piemonte was the town of Alba.
The foundation of Alba's Enological School in 1881 met some of the needs of a rapidly expanding wine industry by providing an important link with other viticultural centres across Europe where rational systems of cultivation were already established. Its expertise was much in demand with the arrival of the triple plague from America: first oidium in the 1850s, then peronospora and at the turn of the century phylloxera.
The school's first director, Domizio Cavazza, formed the Langhe's first cooperative at Barbaresco in 1894. Although he is also credited with pioneering dry Barbaresco, Oudart's earlier work for Count di Castelborgo in Neive probably Iaid the foundations for this style. The influence of the school also helped to establish the single Guyot training system as the norm in Piemonte.
In the nineteenth century vines such as Freisa, grignolino, Brachetto and malvasia were still much in evidence and vinified into sweet and sometimes sparkling wines. While the first two still have some following and Brachetto is occasionally encountered, malvasia has all but disappeared from the zone.
Following phylloxera, two major themes became apparent: the emergence of Barbera as a strong and adaptable variety able to produce both quality and quantity and the unequivocal confirmation of Nebbiolo as the area's premium red grape. As elsewhere in Europe, traditions were reinforced in the face of adversity: though a clear identity for Barolo and Barbaresco had been realized only in the second half of the previous century, they quickly became the cornerstone of the new wine industry of the 1920s.
20th Century Industrialisation
By now a new factor had severely dislocated the lifestyle of the Piemontese vine-growers: In the early years of the twentieth century, Piemonte led the way in northern Italy's move towards industrialization and large numbers of the work force were lured away from the land by the promise of higher wages and less backbreaking toil in the factories not only of Alba but also in Genoa, Milan and Turin. As in the period immediately following the Second World War there was widespread emigration particularly to the USA. This was also the time when many of today's larger negociant houses were established.
Inevitably, cultivation systems had to be adapted to a much-reduced work force. One of the first casualties was he labour intensive practice of training the vines a catene (in chains), which had been losing favour since the second half of the nineteenth century. This method involved the retention of the productive shoots off the previous year's fruiting cane, which were woven together to form a 'chain' of horizontal branches to support the new season's growth, sometimes with only one training wire 2 metres above the ground.
By now a commercial structure had evolved which today still forms the basis of the wine trade in Piemonte. Negociant houses and the early cooperatives acted as the logical destination for the grapes of numerous smallholders who lacked the experience and resources to see the process through from bud to bottle. In 1934 the Consorzio for Barolo and Barbaresco was founded after decades of deliberation and, as a consequence, production rules were tightened up. With the face of their vineyards reshaped and cellar technology transformed, Piemontese winemakers were looking forward to a more stable future when the Second World War broke out. It took time for the trade to regroup when peace returned. The 1950s and 1960s were the era of the cooperatives: the Antica Contea di Castelvero and Produttori di Barbaresco cooperatives were formed in 1954 and 1958 respectively.
Having arrived at a level of quality of production in the vinification process, it was decided that the Antica Contea should bottle its own wine, giving it direct access to national and international markets and it was with this aim that Araldica was formed in the 1990's.