Malabaila

The Malabailas were a noble family of Asti, present around Canale since the 1200s. Their archive holds the history of Roero wine as much as of the family. After the 1362 vineyard comes a run of nine handwritten letters, the first dated 1598, in which the Dukes of Savoy and the Prince of Piedmont ask Count Malabaila for his wine for court festivities and for their children’s weddings. In the 1700s Luigi Gerolamo Malabaila, ambassador to the Austrian court, was shipping the family’s wine to the capitals of Europe.

Several of today’s wines carry those records on the label. Bric Volta is named for the Masseria della Volta, entered in Count Daniele Malabaila’s registers in 1583 as arable land with vines, bordering San Damiano and Priocca. The Favorita grows on the hill Count Daniele bought in 1508, described in the deed as ‘in montem Bonvicini, terram, gerbum, boscum et pratum cum motta ibidem existente’. Aja is the Piedmontese word for the farmyard threshing floor, recorded on the estate in the sixteenth century.

For most of that history the family grew grapes and made wine as landowners did. The turn to quality came in the 1980s, when Corradino dal Pozzo Carrega Malabaila, Lucrezia’s father, began working with the oenologist and agronomist Valerio Alfredo Falletti, whose father had also worked for the family. The wines were first made in the cellars of the family’s castle; the estate as it now runs dates from 1986.

The Roero lies on the left bank of the Tanaro, across the river from the Langhe hills of Barolo and Barbaresco. In the Pliocene this was the floor of a shallow sea, and the hills are its sediment: loose marine sand over marl and clay, so soft in places that the slopes are cut by deep gullies, and full of fossil shells. The soil drains quickly and warms quickly. Nebbiolo grown in it is paler, more fragrant and earlier to drink than its cousins over the river, and Arneis keeps its lift and its bitter-almond finish.

Arneis is the Roero’s own white grape, recorded here as early as 1478, and its Piedmontese name means a stubborn, rebellious character, hard to tame. Malabaila grows about six and a half hectares of it, alongside eight and a half of Nebbiolo, three of Barbera and smaller plots of Favorita and Brachetto. The vine material is the estate’s own: Arneis, Nebbiolo and Barbera are propagated from an old family vineyard.

What sets the property apart from many in the Roero is how much of it is not vineyard. More than forty hectares are hazelnut groves and old oak and chestnut woods, which the family describes as more extensive than the vines and keeps for the life they hold. It makes for a landscape of small vineyards in clearings, each with its own aspect and its own wine.

In 1990 the family built a new cellar at Cascina Pradvaj and then raised an artificial hill over it, so the earth would hold the temperature steady without machines. It is partly underground still. Inside are steel and concrete tanks and wooden casks of several sizes. The cellar also takes in a nineteenth-century cave carved by hand into the soft rock, where wine rests in silence and visitors walk through.

In the vineyard the rules are simple and old-fashioned: no herbicides, natural fertilisation, grass left growing in the rows, Guyot pruning and picking by hand from September into October. In the cellar, in the estate’s words, the work is ‘measured interventions, respect for timing’. Most of the wines never see wood at all. Le Tre Arneis ferments cool in steel for about twenty days and rests there seven months. Aja, the Langhe Nebbiolo, has a deliberately short ten-day fermentation and no oak, to keep the fruit fresh. Bric Volta, the Roero Nebbiolo, is the exception: after its months in steel it goes into wood for a year and a half, which softens the tannin without covering the sand-grown perfume.

Lucrezia Carrega Malabaila is the estate’s commercial manager and, since the labels were redesigned at the start of the decade, its illustrator. Each back label carries one of her watercolours, drawn from the wine’s character, the history of its grape or a legend of its vineyard. Le Tre shows three mallards: three vineyards in the blend, three brothers, three Malabaila descendants. Cardunaj, the dry red, is Piedmontese for land thick with thistles; her label puts a swallowtail butterfly, often seen among the vines, on a thistle flower. It comes from a native red grape the Roero usually makes sweet, here made dry and aromatic.

The Favorita is the Piedmontese name for the grape Liguria calls Vermentino. It came over the mountains on the old salt road and earned its name, the family says, from the favour it found as both a table grape and a wine grape. On the 1508 hill it makes a crisp, salty white with no oak at all.

None of these wines is made to be monumental. They are made to taste of a particular hill in the Roero, and to be drunk at the table: Le Tre with an aperitivo or white meat, Bric Volta with porcini or polenta, Aja with agnolotti. That they also come with six and a half centuries of paperwork behind them is a pleasure, not the point.

in montem Bonvicini, terram, gerbum, boscum et pratum cum motta ibidem existente

Deed of Count Daniele Malabaila, 1508