Piercarlo Culasso

Piercarlo Culasso is a new name for an old vineyard. The family has been growing Nebbiolo in the Faset sub-zone of Barbaresco since the 1970s, when Piercarlo's father Dante was already making wine from these parcels. For decades the fruit went to other producers. Piercarlo joined the family work around 2000 and spent close to two decades refining the viticulture - pulling chemicals out of the rows, using targeted green manure between the vines, thinning for balance rather than maximum ripeness. Only in 2017, with his children Martina, Michela, and Marco, did he decide to bottle under his own name.

The estate is small, the portfolio growing slowly. The core remains two Barbaresco DOCG bottlings from the Faset cru - a regular Faset and the single-plot Faset Duesoli - but Culasso has recently added a Langhe Nebbiolo, which proved hard to get even within Piedmont. Classic Langhe terroir: limestone, clay, Sant'Agata marls, southwest-facing. In the cellar: 15 to 20 days of fermentation in stainless steel, twelve months in neutral French barriques, then time. No new oak, no new noise.

The objective Piercarlo states, over and over, is consistency of expression: harvesting grapes ripe but still fresh, letting each vintage speak in its own register, avoiding the kind of winemaking that flattens one year into the next. It is low-intervention without making a thing of it - no formal organic certification, no natural-wine slogans, just a family that spent decades learning the Faset hillside and eventually decided they should put their own name on the bottle.