Nada Fiorenzo

It’s no cliché to say that, here in the Langa hills of Piedmont in northwest Italy, every stone, every wine cellar, and every single bottle of wine has a unique and enthralling story to tell. I, Bruno Nada, son of Fiorenzo Nada, was born here in Treiso in 1951. In those days, Treiso was a hamlet of Barbaresco, today it’s a commune in its own right, part of the Langhe area, which is part of Unesco world heritage site.

My father, the second last of seven children, inherited a small plot of land on the boundary between Treiso and Alba at the end of the 1950s. His family had always made wine, which they used to sell to local restaurateurs.

When the property was split up among the four sons, they decided to make wine only for friends and relatives and to sell the much sought-after grapes from their vineyards to local traders. Like many other youngsters and families at the time, I was attracted by the promise of an easier life, so I left Treiso and moved to the city. It was the 1960s, the years of the economic boom, of razzle-dazzle, the first TV stations, and easy money. In those days, staying behind in the country meant missing the train to modernity.

After studying at a technical college in Turin and Asti, when I was 22 I started teaching in a school in Alba. I then moved to a hotel management school in Barolo, where I added “food and wine” to the syllabus as a subject of study for budding restaurateurs. Though

I was living in a different world, my ties with Treiso and its countryside were never broken altogether: these places had always been part of me. Meanwhile, the old generation of peasants who had shaped the Langa hills with their skills and traditions were slowly passing away, and there was no one left to accept their inheritance.

The turnaround came when I began associating with the wine world. Meeting some of its most enlightened members, I heard them speak of terroir, of wine as an expression of the local area, of low yields per hectare—and they did so with pride. It was they who taught me to love wine. I was bowled over and I asked my family to stop selling our grapes and to rig out a cellar to make and bottle wine from our vineyards, using fewer bunches to improve maturation. It was a simple idea and today it might even seem obvious, but in this part of the world at that time it was revolutionary.

Pruvuma (“Let’s give it a go” in dialect) was the only word my father uttered in response. To tell the truth, those weren’t easy times because the generation clash was fierce from the word go. I used to have to wake up early in the morning to thin out the vines, and I would hide the grapes in ditches so that no one would see them. It was 1982, and our exciting adventure was about to begin. I was lucky because I had my father’s wisdom to back me and because our land was fantastic for winemaking.

Rombone, is the name of the place where I was born and the farm I now live on. It’s the place to which all the threads of my life are tied. The first review of one of my wines was written by Carlin Petrini, the founder and leader of Slow Food, then known as Arcigola. The year was 1987. I was proud of the first wines I produced and those small early pleasures were to grow in intensity every year that passed. I was convinced I had made the right choice and I decided to soldier on.

It was thus that the first bottles of Dolcetto d’Alba and Barbaresco that we produced in 1982 were subsequently joined by Seifile in 1988, then by Langhe Nebbiolo, Barbera d’Alba and Barbaresco single-vineyard Rombone and, more recently, after extending our small plot of land, by single vineyard Barbaresco Manzola and single vineyard Montaribaldi. A project born long ago is continuing year by year. People from all over the world come to see me at my home in Rombone: tourists, critics, customers. My father, my family, and I welcome them as if they were old friends - simply, with a bottle of wine for company. My two children, Monica and Danilo, work alongside me in the vineyard and the wine cellar. Today I can detect in them the same passion that inspired me all these years ago. Now it’s they who have to decide what to make of this dream.

- Bruno Nada

THE CELLAR

The Nada family has a deep understanding of cellaring. This is a result of the skills handed down to them and of their involvement in the grape harvest. Added to this is a certain amount of “poetic license” based on their own personal taste.

The cellar is located in Rombone, next to the house in which they live. The exceptional grapes are the product of months of care and attention in the vineyard. Picked strictly by hand, the fruit arrives in the cellar in small crates. This is just the first step on their long journey. After soft pressing comes maceration and primary fermentation with the grape skins, seeds, and stems, where sugars are transformed into alcohol. All this takes place in vertical stainless steel at a controlled temperature, using traditional methods to pump and press the must over the grape dregs.

The next step is secondary fermentation where harsh malic acid is converted into softer lactic acid. This process is carried out in the barrels where the Barbaresco Rombone, Seifile, Manzola, and Montaribaldi are stored. The wine is subsequently aged in barrels to soften it. This requires a relatively short period for most of the wines, but a much longer period, even up to two years, for wines produced from single vineyards. Finally, the wine is bottled and aged for a number of months in the underground cellar to enhance the harmony of its flavor.