Curto, "La Foia", La Morra, Barolo

Over the last however many years, I have dug through many hundreds of non-stratospherically priced Barolos, always seeking a deceptively simple goal: finding one that drinks like the absolute top tier. Most inexpensive Barolo tastes, unsurprisingly, like inexpensive Barolo: good, but not genuinely special. Nadia Curto's 2020 La Foia is different. The recipe is almost embarrassingly simple: 1) real estate—fruit from Arborina, arguably the greatest single vineyard in La Morra; 2) heroically serious, no-expense-spared organic farming; and 3) winemaking that largely ignores modern technology and fashion in favor of the methods that produced the great Barolos of the last century. The result is the sort of bottle I am perpetually searching for: real grand-vin Barolo character without grand-vin Barolo pricing.

The first piece of the equation is Arborina. Nadia Curto's tiny estate sits in Annunziata, and both La Foia and the family's separately bottled Arborina originate from this celebrated hillside, although the two wines are deliberately made in radically different ways. La Foia comes from the first rows climbing the Arborina slope at roughly 270–300 meters, and Curto reports vines more than eighty years old; annual production is only about 7,000 bottles. Arborina occupies one of La Morra's privileged positions, producing Nebbiolo with the perfume, suppleness and almost Burgundian aromatic detail for which the commune is famous. This matters enormously. You can simplify a label, dispense with luxury packaging and reject fashionable cellar equipment, but there is no inexpensive substitute for great vineyard land—and La Foia begins with exactly that.

Then there is the farming. Nadia Curto joined the family estate in 2000, continuing the work begun by her parents, Marco and Adele, who have tended their four hectares for more than sixty years. Curto describes an approach based on natural manure, no herbicides or pesticides, extensive manual work in the vineyard, spontaneous fermentation, no fining or filtration and extremely restrained sulfur additions. It is an unusually uncompromising approach for a wine occupying this price category, but it explains much of La Foia's clarity. Nebbiolo is a merciless translator of both vineyard and farming: when the fruit is healthy and the cellar work restrained, the grape has an extraordinary ability to communicate tiny gradations of perfume, earth, tannin and mineral structure. Curto doesn't attempt to manufacture complexity after harvest. The complexity has already been farmed into the grapes.

The final piece is perhaps my favorite. Nadia is the niece of legendary Barolo modernist Elio Altare, and the Curto cellar actually offers a fascinating side-by-side study of the old Barolo wars: the Arborina bottling employs shorter maceration and barrique, while La Foia deliberately preserves the family's traditional method. For La Foia, maceration lasts around twenty days with manual pump-overs before the wine spends two years in enormous 20–30 hectoliter oak casks and another year in bottle; it is neither fined nor filtered. There is something wonderfully unfashionable about the whole process. Rather than sanding down Nebbiolo's tannins, sweetening its fruit with small oak, or engineering it for immediate seduction, Curto allows Barolo to remain Barolo: fragrant, pale, tannic, savory, transparent and stubbornly tied to place. The objective isn't to modernize what the great masters of the last century understood. It is to preserve it.

In the glass, La Foia offers the wonderfully contradictory personality that makes traditional La Morra Barolo so compelling: delicacy of perfume married to formidable structure. Expect translucent garnet color and a nose of red cherry, dried rose, orange peel and wild strawberry gradually opening toward anise, tobacco, dried herbs, leather and earthy spice. The palate is lithe rather than massive, with bright acidity carrying the fruit while Nebbiolo's fine, persistent tannins provide the architecture; with air, the finish becomes increasingly savory, floral and mineral. Serve it around 62–64°F in a large Burgundy stem and don't be afraid to give a young bottle a serious decant. And alongside it, make agnolotti al brasato: Piedmontese stuffed pasta filled with slowly braised beef and dressed simply with the concentrated roasting juices. The pasta's richness softens Nebbiolo's tannin, the braised meat answers Barolo's earthy depth, and the restrained sauce leaves enough space for Arborina's extraordinary perfume to remain the star. This is exactly what I want from affordable Barolo—not an approximation of greatness, but the real ingredients of greatness assembled without the price tag.