Elio Altare Revisited: 1970 – 1991

"The idea that a Barolo should be undrinkable in its youth and that a consumer should have to wait twenty years for the wine to be great is ridiculous,” says Elio Altare,…and so begins what will turn out to be a memorable day.

Though only in his mid-fifties, Altare is preparing for what will be his 40th harvest in 2006.  Along the way he has had a profound impact in the region and influenced an entire generation of younger winemakers.  In the late 1970s Altare and a group of young local producers traveled to Burgundy in a series of trips that would ultimately lead to a redefinition of Barolo.  Altare recalls that at the time Barolo was made from high yields with little attention paid in the vineyards.  The wines saw long periods of maceration on the skins and were then often aged in attics, where they were exposed to violent swings in temperature that resulted in the premature oxidation of the wines.  In addition many producers did not pay adequate attention to cleanliness in the cellar and dirty barrels were often the root cause of defective, flawed wines.  Altare wanted to make a more elegant, and accessible Barolo, with the finesse of the wines he was tasting in Burgundy.  He sought to convince his father to adopt some of the techniques he had seen in Burgundy such as lower yields in the vineyards and barriques in the cellar, but to no avail.

In 1983 Altare, in a now famous story, took a chainsaw to his father’s old botti.  For this act he was disinherited and the family estate passed to his sisters, something unheard of in the male-dominated society of the time.  Fortunately Altare’s sisters recognized his passion and had the foresight to restore the estate to him. 

Throughout the 1980s Altare experimented with shorter and shorter fermentations and introduced the use of barriques.  Altare’s 1982 Barolo (see below) was aged entirely in cask.  The profound 1985 Barolo Arborina (see Piedmont Report Issue 5) represents a transitional style, as the wine was aged in a mix of cask and barrique, but by 1987 the Altare style as we know it had been formed.  Along the way Altare endured the criticisms of those who decried his approach and claimed the wines would age prematurely.  Today there can be no doubt that the wines have held up well.  In fact, in some cases the wines have actually aged better than more traditional interpretations, proving that quality is a measure of a producer’s seriousness rather than just a reflection of the tools used.