Canonica Giovanni

Giovanni Canonica works from a house in the village of Barolo with his cellar underneath it, on around two hectares of vines. The scale is the first thing to understand about him: roughly 6,000 bottles a year, all told, a good share of which has historically gone to Japan while the rest was sold at the door. He made his first harvest in 1983, sold the wine in bulk for years, started bottling in the 1990s, and only became findable outside Piedmont around 2000 after a Japanese importer pushed him to export.

The wine he is known for is Paiagallo, a 1.5 hectare parcel on the hill directly above the village, opposite Cannubi. He is one of only three owners of that vineyard, and the only one who bottles it on its own. In the early 2010s he inherited a second, smaller plot in the neighbouring commune of Grinzane Cavour, under a hectare, with vines over fifty years old and an unusually high share of Nebbiolo Rosé, the pale old sub-variety that mostly disappeared when Barolo replanted in the postwar decades. Its first vintage was 2012. A Langhe Rosso, introduced in 2013, takes the less interesting sectors of both sites.

His cellar practice has not moved with the fashion: destemmed fruit, indigenous yeasts, thirty to forty days on the skins with no temperature control, a vertical press, then a long rest in concrete and big old Slavonian botti of around twenty hectolitres before bottling without fining or filtration, with minimal sulfur. His importers describe the vineyards as worked without herbicides, pesticides or fertilizers, using only sulfur and copper, though he holds no organic certification.