He is no longer a kid

It all started out in 2015 with him asking his Dad if he could harvest a little of the fruit to make some wine for friends in Torino. He was working at Principiano in Serralunga. He was learning. His mind had been opened to a revolutionary idea that he had never heard about or seen before in top wine from the Langhe: focus on the vineyard, not the cellar- farm organically. Inspired, Nicholas had convinced his father and grandfather to convert the family holdings in San Luigi from conventional to organic (practicing) farming. Now, he was working on getting them to rotate from being a grape grower-seller to the idea of existing as a real winery. He needed to show them he could make great wine, and that it would sell.

January 2023. After the tour of the vineyards, we entered the cantina for a tasting of the 2021s. I had always defined Nicholas' work as progressive- as a style of Dogliani that existed to represent the raw fruit of Dolcetto. Where much of the great Dogliani was an attempt to emulate Barolo using Dolcetto- with wines aged in large grande botte casks for years- Nicholas was doing the opposite. His work was about trying to preserve the work in the vineyard through reductive fermentations in concrete that then saw aging in stainless steel inox tanks to hold the wine in stasis. In prior vintages, there was always a bit of a raw and wild note to his wines. A certain grit. I had chalked this up to the reductive winemaking- something that would mellow with time.

He poured us the 2021 Dogliani. That perfect delicious fruit was there, but the grit of the tannic edge was gone. In its place was this incredibly pretty- lovely, even- elegant tannin. The texture was now ethereal, and an elegance unseen before, emerged. I turned to him and confronted him. The wine is incredible. What did you do?