Remembering Domenico Clerico 

BY ANTONIO GALLONI I JULY 20, 2017

Italian translation follows

Late Sunday evening, as I sat in one of my favorite wine bars in Piedmont, the long-dreaded news that had been in the air for the last few days finally arrived. Domenico Clerico had succumbed to his battle with cancer at 67 years of age. One of the most beloved personalities in Piedmont, Clerico touched many lives during a career that saw him rise from total obscurity to become one of the world’s most admired winemakers.

Clerico was most often associated with the modernist school in Barolo, a group of producers who made dark, rich, sumptuous wines that shocked a dormant region out of complacency starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although the traditionalist versus modernist debate fueled much of the discussion of Piedmont wines between the 1980s and early 2000s, there can be no question that these Barolos and Barbarescos brought a level of attention to Piedmont that had never existed previously, especially from international markets.

Most remarkably, unlike most of his peers and contemporaries – Elio Altare, Roberto Voerzio, Chiara Boschis, Luciano Sandrone and Enrico Scavino among them – Clerico did not come from a family that made wine on a commercial scale. Through passion, grit and hard work, Clerico built a world-class domaine from nothing in one generation. Clerico told me his story in this interview we did ten years ago.

Domenico Clerico embodied all the qualities of Piedmont’s best artisan growers. His hands were thick, weathered by many years of pruning and spending time in the vineyard, the place where he was clearly most at home. Clerico was also fiercely loyal, respectful and old-fashioned in his human values. He always spoke of Aldo Conterno and Giovanni Conterno, Monforte’s elder statesmen, with the greatest reverence, even though his stylistic choices were the exact opposite of those favored by the previous generation. Once he had a critical mass of vineyard holdings, Clerico preferred not to bottle his Barolo Bricotto Bussia out of deference to Aldo Conterno, with whom he did not want to compete.