Barolo del Comune di Grinzane Cavour

Giovanni Canonica works out of a house in the village of Barolo with the cellar underneath it, on something close to two hectares of vines. By merchant accounts he made his first harvest in 1983 and sold in bulk for years before starting to bottle in the 1990s, with the wines only becoming commercially available around 2000, and total output across the range at roughly 6,000 bottles a year.

He is known for Paiagallo, the 1.5 hectare parcel on the hill above the village. This is the other wine. His importers say he inherited a small plot in the commune of Grinzane Cavour in the early 2010s, under a hectare, planted with vines over fifty years old and carrying a high proportion of Nebbiolo Rosé, the old sub-variety that largely disappeared when Barolo replanted in the postwar decades. The first vintage from it was 2012, and the bottling is small, put by one Italian merchant at around a thousand bottles.

"Barolo del Comune di" is a real category rather than a fallback. When the appellation introduced its Menzioni Geografiche Aggiuntive from the 2010 harvest, eleven of the 181 mentions were communal rather than single-vineyard, Grinzane Cavour among them. A wine labelled this way is claiming the township, not a delimited cru, which is what a grower uses when the fruit comes from more than one spot in a commune or from a site they would rather not name.

In the cellar the approach is old-fashioned and consistent: destemmed fruit, indigenous yeasts, thirty to forty days on the skins with no temperature control, then time in concrete and large old Slavonian botti of around twenty hectolitres, with minimal sulfur. His importers describe a vertical hand press where some merchants describe foot-pressing, and sources also differ on whether the ferment itself happens in wood or concrete. The vineyards are worked without herbicides, pesticides or fertilizers, using only sulfur and copper, though the estate holds no certification.

2022 was a drought year in the Langhe, the driest in decades, with a snowless winter that never replenished the water table and about 385 mm of rain against the roughly 480 mm the vines need. Flowering came early, the heat built through July, and harvest ran from mid-September, well ahead of the historical norm. Berries were small with a high skin-to-pulp ratio and reported yields fell anywhere from a fifth to nearly half depending on the estate. The 15% on this label is the vintage speaking. Under the appellation's ageing rules - 38 months, at least 18 of them in wood - a 2022 Barolo could not be released before January 2026.