The Dolcetto Affair
Loss, Leather Jackets and Hard Boiled Eggs
In an unusual and spicy turn of events my very first harvest began in early September of 2009 in the heart of a Barolo at one of the premier addresses in the region and ended not long after in Serbia, under a cold, damp underpass in Novi Belgrad. I landed in Castiglione Faletto to work the vintage for Luca at Vietti, whom I’d met earlier that year in California; and things were going swimmingly for a few weeks until a surprise visit from a very prominent American wine critic upended the peace of our little village and precipitated a turn of events that resulted in my downfall, or something like that. James Suckling arrived late one September evening in Milan, and it seemed to raise the region’s collective pulse. Suckling was good friends with Luca and so naturally his first port of call was Vietti, where he was greeted with verticals of all the Single Vineyard Barolo/Barbaresco/Barbera/Docletto possible. While we troglodytic cellar hands were not participating in these engagements we were always allowed drink what was left in the tasting room after work.
This, of course, was no ordinary tasting and Manfred, my South African colleague, and I went to work on the remaining bottles. At some point Manfred uttered some sort of warning about the pace of consumption in that goofy brand of English that South Africans speak, but I couldn’t understand him at the time.
The next morning was hard. The highly tannic wines had sucked all residual moisture from my skull. My hair itself hurt. Nonetheless, we were due at the winery at 7am for the morning ferment round and pumpovers.
The winery had a hall of a dozen or tall 5 to 6 thousand liter tanks fitted with automatic pumpers systems that would keep caps wet overnight, and ensure good fermentation kinetics. Most days, however, we were to disconnect this system and perform aerative open pumpovers to prevent overly reductive and stinky ferments, which is a common issue in the region. This was a delicate procedure requiring one to switch on the pump on the wall, run back to the hose connecting the the tank plumbing to pump, disconnect it by screwing off the triclover fitting and prying off the now negatively pressurised hose while simultaneously closing the valve to the tank itself, allowing the pump to drain the line and lose minimal wine in the process and finally to switch the pump off. Easy.
I could barely tolerate the light of day that morning and despite somehow managing to execute steps 1-3, I forgot to close the valve and the resulting stream of dolcetto from the tank knocked me onto my ass. In the next 7 seconds, or 4 hours in adrenaline-time, dolcetto painted the tanks behind me and covered the floor from wall to wall.
The cellar master, Dragan, a stern man who had fled the worst of the war in Balkans 15 years earlier, witnessed all of it and suggested that I should probably leave the country. Luckily, he knew of convoy of Macedonians heading east to Kriva Palanka leaving the from the Lidl parking lot in Gallo d’Alba that night, and there might be space for me.
Just before midnight I piled in to an MG rover with 4 other grown men and collection of goods and gifts they were bringing back to their families. I spent the next 12 hours with a sewing machine on my lap and a barbie doll set as a head rest. The same guy drove the whole time, through the night stopping for fuel once across the Slovenian border and then again in the middle of nowhere in Croatia. Here we pulled to a stop and without a word uttered all four of them got out of the car and put on what looked like matching leather jackets. The driver then reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out four hard boiled eggs and a handful Macedonian chillies. The four of them stared at me, incredulous that I had neither an egg nor a leather jacket, until the driver (I never knew his name) reached into that egg pocket again and produced a fifth egg for me. At dawn they unceremoniously dropped me off at an underpass in Novi Belgrade, where I knew someone who could help me.
The three people who saved my life that day. Dragan, Manfred, and Ivana the Belgrade Connection.
I’ll never really know the true losses of dolcetto from that day, but I feared it could have amounted to billions of Lire. Maybe it was 2000 Liters that ended up on the tiled floor, or maybe 1400. Perhaps it was only been 30.* Regardless, that first vintage instilled in me a love for Dolcetto that persists.
For a wine that was never valued highly like Nebbiolo its uniquely perfumed and eminently drinkable when done right. Give it the respect it deserves in the vineyard and the cellar and it rewards with all the violets, marzipan and briar fruit perfume. Its the perfect chilled companion to Carne Cruda (Northern Italy’s spartan, produce first steak tartare) and few wines bring me more joy. Years later I ended up launching a brand dedicated to dolcetto and only dolcetto from a vineyard on the calcerous soils on the border of Monforte and Dogliani. Semi-carbonic, lifted, perfumed dolcetto in all its glory. I relocated permanently to Australia in late 2017 and reluctantly let that project go to establish Eleven Sons here.
Eight years without dolcetto in the winery was nine too many, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to announce the arrival of my first Limestone Coast Dolcetto. Dolcetto seems to thrive here in the alkaline soils like those of the Langhe and the almost paradoxical diurnal shifts help to extend our growing season while preserving freshness.
My father and I handpicked in early March directly to tank where the dolcetto underwent carbonic maceration for a couple weeks before being gently crushed over the course of a few days. We pressed it off back into Stainless steel and celebrated with a cigarette and a hard-boiled egg in the shade.
2025 Carafage Conseillé
Dolcetto
Limestone Coast
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*Years later Luca pardoned me and we became fast friends even working together establishing a winery for a Russian Investor.
