BRILLIANT BARBERA
A talent contest of Piedmont’s native grape varieties might well see the top prize going to Nebbiolo. It’s Barbera, however, that gets my vote for congeniality. Grown throughout Italy, Barbera is among the country’s top 10 most planted grapes. It is also one of the few indigenous Italian varieties succeeding in international soil. Nevertheless, Barbera’s most significant plantings are in the northwestern region of Piedmont, which provides benchmark examples.
Believed to have existed since the Middle Ages, Barbera originated in Alessandria province. During the 1900s, this easy-to-grow, vigorous variety established itself as Piedmont’s reliable workhorse. ‘It was a very productive grape and ripeness was rarely fully achieved,’ states Stefano Almondo of Giovanni Almondo in Roero. The resulting wines were mouthpuckeringly tart, painfully skinny and often slightly spritzy. At best, Barbera was prized as a blending partner with Nebbiolo, lending colour and tempering the latter’s fiercer tannins.
Barbera’s prospects began to improve in the 1980s as producers started shifting their
