Rest assured I’m not about to tell you how the Piemontese wines of 2010 taste before they’ve been made…although, and call me ‘nebbiolonuts’, has anyone else noticed the similarity between vintages over the past four decades, eg. ’09/’99/’89/’79 etc..? Only ’81,’82, ’91 and ’04 appear to buck the trend radically…

But what a whacky year it’s been, kicking off with a winter to top all winters lasting well into what should have primavera (spring). Flowering was not as straight forward as in 2009. For Nebbiolo it seems the key to getting it wrapped up successfully is the position of your vineyard. Not for nothing do they teach you that Nebbiolo must be in the optimum position. As the first to flower it’s vulnerable to any inclemency, or according to le vecchie, the oldies round here (Mario Fontana included it seems!), there was an important shift from the old to the new moon during flowering. So if your Nebbiolo or Barbera flowers had yet to set due to unsettled weather, or too cooler a site, then flowering could have been upset by the lunar cycle….

This morning I accompanied Davide Rosso of Giovanni Rosso (in the video above) as he inspected the green harvest taking place in his La Serra vineyard, an airy, ventilated ESE facing site, whose bunches included a fair few acineli  (small green tart berries that must be cut out). He took to the vines like a man possessed, cutting out bunches where they touched others or showed too many acinelli.

So having leapfrogged my favourite season, spring, we plunged head long into a hot tub summer, with plenty of sticky ‘afa’/humidity and a few hailstorms into the bargain. And then the sporadic rains of August, fuelling the plants and swelling the berries. Now they need a September that’s warm, dry and ventilated with cool nights to thicken the skins. It might be a ‘grande annata‘, a vintage year, yet for as Barbaresco producer Teobaldo Rivella reminded me: the late ones are often the best…