Langhe & Roero
Two seabeds and a sun angle.
Barolo sits on two old seabeds. West of a line running roughly through Castiglione Falletto, La Morra and Barolo stand on the younger Tortonian marl of Sant'Agata Fossili: blue-grey, calcareous, softer. East of it, Serralunga and eastern Monforte stand on the older, harder, sandier Serravallian marl of the Lequio formation, with a band of Diano sandstone between. Wine writers link the west with perfume and early charm and the east with structure and long life; that is a reading of the wines, not a measurement, but the split is real rock.
The second thing is the sun angle. The great sites are the sorì, the south- and south-west-facing slopes that take the autumn sun squarely, and height lifts them out of the cold air that pools in the valleys on still October mornings. North of the Tanaro, the Roero is a third ground altogether: young, loose marine sand full of fossil shells, cut into steep gullies, giving lighter, more aromatic wines.
Switch between ground, sun and cold air. Every cru in the book is on the map and on the chart beside it; tap any two to compare them and cut a slice through the hills between them.
Curve shapes are illustrative; the size of each swing is from published figures.
Every producer on this plate
Pick a producer to light up their vineyards and see where each wine comes from.
How the cold air is drawn: the autumn fog is modelled as a flat-topped sheet of cold air settling out of the Tanaro valley. It fills every low place it can reach without climbing over higher ground, then thins as the morning warms. Real mornings vary. The model ignores wind and warmth, so treat it as a picture of the pattern rather than a forecast.
Heights marked as the grower's figure come from our producer notes; others are read off the elevation data at the pin. Soil notes come from the producers' technical sheets.
Sources: elevation from AWS Terrain Tiles (public data including the EU-DEM and SRTM).
On to Volnay & Pommard · back to Italy.