Nebbiolo delle Langhe

or Langhe Nebbiolo

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Wine

By Jancis Robinson

Published 2006

  • About

Nebbiolo delle Langhe or Langhe Nebbiolo, formerly a vino da tavola of the piemonte region in north west Italy. In the 1980s a few leading Barolo producers—Aldo Conterno and Elio Altare in particular—pioneered special cuvées based on Nebbiolo but including international varieties given small oak barrel maturation. These wines commanded a much higher price and enjoyed an entirely different prestige from the average Nebbiolo delle Langhe. The approval of an overall regional doc for Piemonte in 1995 remedied this situation by creating a new DOC called Langhe Nebbiolo into which producers in Barolo, Barbaresco, and Roero may declassify their wines, while the much more appropriate nebbiolo d’alba is unavailable to most of Barolo and Barbaresco producers, as in a bizarre quirk of legislation, most of this DOC is reserved exclusively for Roero, although Roero is geographically, politically, and historically separated from the Langhe.