My Name is Barbera's video: Monferrato Moves 4: Nizza Project

Is there anything more adorable than a weimaraner eating grapes in a northern Italian vineyard? Besides a puppy eating grapes in a northern Italian vineyard, I mean? Well, you can decide for yourself after watching today’s video! The dog, and the vineyard, and the grapes that are being eaten, all belong to Gianni Bertolino, of the well-regarded Monferrato producer and President of Associazione dei Produttori del Nizza. Bertolino is one of the most vocal proponents of a special brand of Monferrato, Nizza Docg, designed to sit at the top of the quality pyramid of the region’s Barbera wines, and indisputably one the most complex, structured, and potentially long-lived incarnations of that grape that money can buy. In our video, Bertolino welcomes us and gives us the insider’s view on Nizza wines. Here’s a little bit of background: Nizza is an official subzone of the Barbera d’Asti wine region, with its own set of specific farming, production, and aging regulations, all of which are more stringent and quality-focused than the already stringent and quality-focused regulations that oversee the other Barbera-producing areas of the region. Nizza was officially recognized as a subzone in the 2014 vintage, but the concept stems back at least twenty-some-odd years before that, and its history goes back even longer. The Nizza objective, as explained by Bertolino, has always been to provide a premium version of Barbera, anchored in the French concept of offering a cru vineyard wine, one that showcases the terroir (the unique combination of soil, climate, and winemaking history) of a small, specific area (and in some case, a small, specific vineyard). Despite his dog’s best efforts to cull vineyard production, Bertolino produces an impressive and age-worthy Nizza Barbera, and he is perhaps the perfect person to walk us through what what it really means when a Piedmontese Barbera wine carries the Nizza designation on its label.