Nebbiolo is a fussy, thick-skinned red grape. Its superpower is the ability to capture the signature of the village, hill, soil, microclimate – even the specific plot it grows on and carry those signatures through to the glass. 

Nebbiolo plays in the same league as Pinot Noir: both grapes are light coloured, terroir-obsessed and perfumed. But Nebbiolo’s tannins – assertive, grippy – are very different to Pinot Noir’s finer tannins. Both wines have serious staying power. 

Geologist Edmondo Bonelli led us on a field trip to Treiso, one of the communes in the Barbaresco wine-growing area, just outside Alba. The hills lay beneath a thin veil of fog – nebbia in Italian, and one possible origin of Nebbiolo’s name.

Bonelli explained that the old, shallow, poor soils of the Langhe hills started forming 15 million years ago, when the hills we stood on were still underwater. Composed of limestone, marl, clay and sandstone, these soils give the wines structure and backbone. Change the composition, and the wine adapts. Roero, for example, sits on much younger sandy soils (just 7 million years old), and its wines come out lighter and more fragrant. Easier to drink on a Tuesday.