Enjoy Italy's quiet wine stars

For the Italians, the timing couldn’t be better. The Bordeaux lot are busy trying to flog their less-than-wonderful 2013 vintage in a stalled market. Thanks to small crops, prices of burgundy went up so much this year that even diehard pinot-philes pulled back on the buying a bit. And so the wine brokers and the wine merchants have all been wondering what they can persuade serious wine buyers to get into instead and come up with a brilliant answer – Italian reds from Piedmont.

This is absolutely terrible news for those of us who have long felt relieved that Serious Moneybags haven’t seemed to have noticed how well priced these wines still are compared with their French rivals.

So the first thing I’d like to say to any bankers or barristers reading this is that you probably won’t like barolo. It’s awful stuff, honestly, made from nebbiolo, which is mouth-desiccatingly tannic, and almost impossibly tough when it’s young. It’s not fruity, either, more demanding, thoughtful and all in all can be quite hard work, so if you are thinking about Italian wine, probably best not to get distracted – and carry on buying those nice Super Tuscans.

Right. Hopefully anyone with spending power has pushed off now and I can say what I really think: nebbiolo rocks. Also, the 2010 vintage, which is now being released, is a good one: beautifully cut, classically styled, elegant.

I whiled away an afternoon trying a few dozen of the 2010 barolos last week at a tasting hosted by the wine brokers Fine + Rare. I also spent three days in Piedmont with Liberty Wines in November, visiting producers, talking, eating and remembering that these wines represented in a glass the quintessence of so many of the things I loved about Italy.

Nebbiolo is the anti-X-factor and the anti-ready-meal of grapes. It has the same elegant style as the locals in their dark jeans, jackets and winter sunglasses. It makes savoury wines that as they age become more and more perfumed and smell like a roomful of old books and the dried petals of roses. It’s a wine that creates a moment of peace, because as you sip you want to allow your thoughts to linger over it. It’s also a wine for the table, rather than the sofa.

If you have dinner in Piedmont (and if you never have, I recommend that you book a flight and do it, ideally in November for the truffles), you might eat a simple risotto Milanese; a rich, creamy stuffed onion; a plate of tajarin – a spaghetti-like pasta – dressed with fine shavings of white truffle; vitello crudo (raw veal) dressed with peppery olive oil, a plate of sliced cured meats or a chargrilled veal chop. It’s simple but stylish food for which a glass of pale, austere nebbiolo is the perfect match.

There are exceptions but most producers in Piedmont have barely noticed that the great god Marketing with all his fancy gimmicks exists.

A favourite moment on my recent visit was seeing a producer’s face freeze for a full 30 seconds – in an expression of slack-jawed disbelief, incomprehension and how-stupid-are-people incredulity – as we told him about the Australians who were selling a bottle of £400 wine in a fancy glass “ampoule” and charging £100,000 for it. I think he thought we were winding him up.

Barolo doesn’t really do flashy, which is one reason that, although prices of both wine and land have ascended steeply since the Sixties and Seventies when barolo didn’t have the reputation it has now, it has still not soared out of reach. The trouble is, if it does grow more popular, there won’t be enough of the wine to go around, because there isn’t much of it.

“Barolo is very small,” said Giovanni Massolino as we stood outside his family cellar in Serralunga d’Alba, looking out across winter vines striping the hills. “And it’s small because nebbiolo is a very delicate grape.”

As pinot noir does in Burgundy, nebbiolo also changes its characteristics depending on where precisely it is planted. If you get to know the grape in more detail, you might begin to recognise the differences between the zones: the iron corset structure of the wines grown on Helvetian soils in Serralunga, for example, or — zooming in to look at one individual cru – the spicy, wild, fragrant, incense-like smells that pour off the wines from Cannubi, the little hill just outside the village of Barolo itself.

“There are varieties like cabernet sauvignon and syrah that you can enjoy a glass of in many parts of the world but if you want a glass of nebbiolo you really have to come here.”

It’s cheaper, of course, to let Piedmont come to you. The price of a flight buys a case (of six or 12) 2010 barolo to drink in your own kitchen – a small piece of Italy to be sipped as a steak chars on the grill. A list of recommended producers is above.

*Many of the wines are also being offered by Fine + Rare (frw.co.uk). You might want to cross-check prices if more than one agent is offering stock