Brezza. Barolo 'Castellero'
Barolo DOCG
Grape: Nebbiolo
Fragrant strawberry, rose, camomile, violet and wild honey aromas, deep, fine red berry fruit, rosehip, flint and porcini. A wine of great elegance that will develop over many years. I loved Emma’s note, it smells like a baby’s head.
Best enjoyed 2020-2035
Beef carpaccio with grilled radicchio.
Castellero is at around 200m altitude, it is the closest Cru to Brezza’s cantina. It is on a south facing slope, looking down from the east on Barolo. The soils here are on Diano sandstone and contain 40% sand, 33% silts and 27% clay. This is an unusually high proportion of sand and legend has it that this makes Castello Barolo unwieldy in its youth.
The Nebbiolo was planted in 1970 using a Guyot training system at a density of 3700 vines per hectare. The Nebbiolo clone is called Lampia and if you are interested the rootstock is K5BB. Brezza has under 0.7 ha in the Castellero Cru which produces 6000 kg of fruit in total.
The grapes are handpicked in October, de-stemmed, crushed and fermented in steel tanks using native yeasts. This takes between eight and nine days with frequent pumping over. The wine is then taken off the skins and goes through malolactic fermentation in steel tanks, after which it is moved to 30 hectolitre Slovenian oak botti where it remains for a minimum of two years. Then the wine is tasted to determine an appropriate bottling date. Once bottled it is kept for a further year in a temperature-controlled cellar at about 15°C.
