The Hills Drawn Twice

I have long been intrigued by how often Italian wine looks to France when it presents itself to the world. Mapping is a good example. There is a strong pull towards charting and ranking vineyards in the Burgundian manner, yet the Italian versions rarely land in quite the same way. I once explained to a group of Japanese sommeliers that Italy's MGA system names places without classifying or ranking them. Their response, politely put, was the one I often hear: "So what is it for?"

It is a fair question, and Barolo is a good place to explore it. In the late nineteenth century, Lorenzo Fantini, a surveyor from Monforte, described the zone's finest positions as a practical guide for a province learning to value its Nebbiolo. For much of the following century the great producers blended across villages, and the hillsides mattered mainly as sources for a house style. The first single-vineyard bottlings, Prunotto's Bussia and Vietti's Rocche, appeared in 1961. Ten years later, Renato Ratti published his Carta del Barolo and sorted the sites into quality categories, proposing that these slopes could be read the way Burgundy reads its Côte.

The Menzioni Geografiche Aggiuntive, adopted in 2010, took a different path: 181 official mentions, eleven of them village names, set side by side without hierarchy. For a visitor, that is a great deal to absorb. The scale varies enormously too. Bricco San Pietro in Monforte covers some 380 hectares, Bricco Rocche in Castiglione Falletto less than one and a half, and a name stretched across a large area can gather very different wines under one label, softening the sense of place it was meant to convey. Names also carry weight. The question of how far Cannubi could extend across its neighbouring slopes took seven years in court.

Seen from another angle, the MGAs offer something quieter and perhaps more lasting. Many of their names, Cannubi, Brunate and Cerequio among them, appear in eighteenth-century records, and their boundaries and very reasons for existing reflect a cultural and historical reality that was there long before anyone thought of classifying it. Fantini's list, Ratti's ranking, and the MGA each answer the questions of their time, and none is simply more accurate than the others. Read together, they show the hills through the eyes of those who drew them. Climate is already pushing growers towards higher, cooler slopes, and the map will be drawn again.