Left undiscovered, Barbaresco Il Bricco is a wine whose great evolutionary potential confirms the intuition of Pio Boffa, who bought the vineyard in Treiso in 1972 and began making this wine in 1990.
By the will of Pio Boffa, the purchase of the eight-hectare vineyard, 400 meters above sea level on the hill of Treiso, occurs in the early 1970s. Before the Ornate (1974), in Serralunga d’Alba. Vineyards both almost in
monopoles, whose grapes are vinified in the winery in the historic center of Alba. Cellar that spans four floors underground and takes advantage of the revolutionary pump system developed by Pio’s father (an engineer at Innocenti in Milan), who in 1942 dropped everything to devote himself to the winery he inherited from his wife.
A challenge, an energy, a desire for revenge, which Pius lived by developing an entrepreneurial spirit leading him to project himself into the future, being able to figure out where to go and which wind to follow. Overcoming the fear of time.
With the first effects of climate change Pius already had in his house, but as an owner, the grapes he first bought. From here, he studies them and makes wine: he makes room in the cellar. The first public release of a wine produced from a single vintage is the Barolo Ornato (1985). An important step, at Veronelli’s suggestion. It is not about wine being better or worse than others, but having different characteristics.
The journey actually began in 1972, with the purchase of Il Bricco di Treiso, where the company had been buying grapes for fifty years. Pius began experimenting with the first winemaking-the so-called parcellari-which developed (later) in the Langa. We will need years before presenting a wine from grapes harvested from the top of the marly, sandy hillside. And it is also this, perhaps the main reason, that has made this Barbaresco a more under-the-radar wine than the estate’s others. Then making him lag behind in the market is the period of refinement: one year longer than required by the product specification: 3 years. A Barbaresco treated like a Barolo.
A choice imposed by place itself, different maturations and a changing stylistics, not so much in favor of market taste, which has changed over time, but rather in accompaniment to the different maturities of the grapes. It looks to the lightness and expressiveness of the fruit, which is especially noticeable in the latest Barbaresco Il Bricco Docg 2020.
Since 2012 a series of changes have been taking place in the winery: less barrique, more large wood and concrete. To those who ask whether one is a traditionalist or a modernist, Federica Boffa, at the helm of the winery along with her cousin Cesare Benvenuto, she replies, “We are Pio Cesare“. Different extractions, less barrels, only fulling and no pumping over. The result is a stylistics that looks at the contemporary taste And chronicling the vintage. The point of proposing and telling the project of Il Bricco through a vertical is just that: “Presenting wine through those vintages considered lesser” as told by Cousin Caesar.
Coming out in the market we have 2020, but on the occasion of the birthday since the birth of this single-vineyard Barbaresco, staged on May 22 in Milan at Cracco’s restaurant, the family also offered battery wines from vintages considered “minor”: from 1997, to 2004, 2009, 2011 and 2015. With a 1997 hinting at a few wrinkles of fatigue, while remaining upright and energetic, a 2004 who shows us to be in a full state of grace, with still gifts and care in his telling, before a 2009 spontaneous, in which one senses the winery’s sharp turn toward a change of approach in winemaking that is equally convincingly evident, in the warm vintage 2011 and in the 2015, but with less propulsion, but a powerful and accomplished sip in the fruit.
TO READ THE WINE DESCRIPTIONS, WITH SCORE AND AVERAGE SHELF PRICE, CLICK ON THE TABS BELOW.
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TASTINGS
