Vietti Barbera d’Alba Trevìe 2023
£23.95
The wine
Smooth and rounded, showing lovely purity of fruit with a core of ripe red cherry enveloped by delicate vanilla and violet. Sweet tannins and beautifully integrated oak carry through to a cherry note on the long, persistent finish.
Tre Vigne means three vineyards, and the wine is blended from parcels across the Alba zone rather than drawn from a single site. Barbera is the everyday red of Piedmont, naturally high in acidity and low in tannin, which is why it has always been the grape locals drink while the Nebbiolo sleeps in the cellar. A portion of the ageing here is in oak, which rounds the acidity without burying the fruit.
The producer
Vietti
View all Vietti winesVietti is one of the defining names of Piedmont, based in the village of Castiglione Falletto at the heart of Barolo. The family have grown grapes here since the nineteenth century, but the estate as we know it was shaped by Alfredo Currado, who married Luciana Vietti in 1957 and spent the next four decades changing what Piedmont thought possible.
Two things made his name. In 1961 he bottled Barolo from the Rocche di Castiglione vineyard on its own, one of the first single-cru Barolos ever released, at a time when almost everything was blended across the commune. The idea that individual sites deserved their own bottling is now orthodoxy; then it was heresy. He also rescued Arneis, the white grape of the Roero, which had fallen to a handful of rows and was days from disappearing altogether.
The range here runs from Roero Arneis and Timorasso through Barbera and Langhe Nebbiolo to seven Barolo crus and a Barbaresco, each farmed and vinified separately. Vietti labels have carried commissioned artwork since 1974, which is why no two look quite alike.
