The Barolo Boys: the revolution that split the Langhe

A chainsaw, a trip to Burgundy and twenty years of arguments: the story of the young winemakers who changed Barolo, and of those who said no.

Today Barolo is one of the most famous Italian wines in the world. It is hard to imagine that in the mid-1970s, in the Langhe hills of Piedmont where it is made, it barely sold: according to the accounts gathered in the documentary Barolo Boys, some producers gave it away as a discount to customers who bought their Dolcetto. The hills were poor and, after a few difficult vintages, the future of the wine was anything but certain.

What happened over the next twenty years is one of the finest, and most quarrelsome, stories in Italian wine.

A trip to Burgundy

In January 1976 Elio Altare, a young winemaker from La Morra, set off for Burgundy with a friend. There he found producers as small as himself who sold their wine at prices nobody in the Langhe would have dreamed of, and who worked their vineyards and cellars in a very different way from what he had learned at home.

He came back with a clear idea: Barolo could be worth as much as a great French wine, but almost everything had to change.

The chainsaw and the barrels

The first change was in the vineyard. Altare began green harvesting: cutting away part of the bunches in summer, so the vine would ripen less fruit, more concentrated. For his father’s generation it was an unacceptable waste: in the film he recalls his father begging him on his knees to stop, accusing him of throwing away what God had given him.

Then came the cellar. The family conflict went as far as the inheritance: his father disinherited him. In 1983 Altare took a chainsaw to the old barrels, the ones he considered dirty and rotten, and threw the others out. It has become the defining scene of the whole story.

In their place came French barriques, small barrels of new oak, together with shorter macerations and temperature control during fermentation. The result was a different Barolo: darker, fruitier, soft even when young, with no need to wait years before opening it.

The “boys” and their success

Altare was not alone. In the Langhe a small generation of winemakers in their thirties took the same road: among them Luciano Sandrone, Domenico Clerico, Roberto Voerzio, Enrico Scavino, Elio Grasso, Chiara Boschis and Giorgio Rivetti. They compared notes, tasted together, and shared ideas and contacts.

In the 1990s American critics and buyers fell in love with those wines, and the American press gave them the name they are remembered by: the Barolo Boys. Within a few years, winemakers who had inherited poor hillsides became stars courted all over the world.

The other half of the Langhe

Not everyone agreed, and the disagreement became a war of ideas. On the other side were the traditionalists, such as Bartolo Mascarello and Beppe Rinaldi: long macerations, large barrels, austere wines that ask for years of patience. For them, barrique covered Nebbiolo, the Barolo grape, and its place of origin with the taste of oak, and a Barolo that tastes of vanilla is no longer Barolo.

The symbol of that resistance is a label. Bartolo Mascarello hand-painted some of them with a slogan that became famous: No barrique, no Berlusconi. No to barrique, because he was a traditional producer; no to Berlusconi, because he didn’t like that kind of politics. Today those bottles are collector’s items.

The clash even went public: in Turin Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, organised a tasting that set three Barolos by Altare against three by Giovanni Conterno, one of the most respected names of the traditional school.

So who won?

The modernists had a ready answer for anyone who accused them of betraying the past: tradition is an innovation that worked. And on many things they were right. Care in the vineyard, lower yields, a clean cellar, the idea that a small grower could bottle and sell their own wine around the world: these have become normal for everyone, traditionalists included.

But over time taste changed again. The market began to look for wines that spoke of their place more than of oak, and many producers who had embraced barrique went back, at least in part, to large barrels and a more classic style. Some also point out that, at first, barrique was a practical choice for Altare before an aesthetic one: he had little wine, and the big barrels were simply too big.

Perhaps the most honest answer is that both sides won. The Barolo Boys took Barolo to the world and taught everyone to look after the vineyard; the traditionalists reminded everyone that a great wine must taste of where it comes from. Whoever opens a bottle of Barolo today, from either school, is also drinking the result of that quarrel.

If you want to understand what DOCG means on a Barolo label, I wrote about it in How to read an Italian wine label.