Bolmida declares Barolo prices very attractive

The new kid on Britain’s Piedmont block, Silvano Bolmida, described the average price of the region’s famously expensive Barolos as currently “very attractive” during the official launch of his wines in the UK this month.

Speaking of the well-known 100% Nebbiolo wine, he said: “While prices between 1990 and 2002 were very high they have been coming back and are now more interesting.”

Bolmida, who produces a small range of good value and beautifully balanced wines from a five-hectare estate in Bussia, has, from this month, secured UK trade distribution through Bancroft.

The London-based merchant and distributor told the drinks business that it has already seeded the producer’s Barolo and Barbera into a handful of British restaurants, including Michelin-starred gastropub The Harwood Arms in London, and is promoting the range as part of a Piedmont offer this week for private clients.

Bolmida exports as much as 90% of his 30,000-bottle production to as many as 13 countries, including several in the Far East. Explaining such a broad spread, Silvano said: “It’s easier to sell a pallet in Switzerland or the UK than one case in Turin,” and lamented a lack of interest in the Italian city for anything but the most established brands of the region.

Silvano, who inherited the Bussia vineyards in 1999 and immediately began bottling the grapes under his own label, takes a meticulous, but also somewhat unconventional approach to every aspect of production.

Neither traditional nor modern, he is attempting to take the best from the past while also fearlessly experimenting with a range of winemaking techniques to express the potential in his prized estate.

For example, in the vineyard, Bolmida employs organic methods, growing and ploughing in cover crops on a yearly basis and adding only plant-based fertilisers and not manure which, he told db, creates “an unstable humus”. He has, however, no desire for certification and has adopted organic practices for “vine health” and out of “respect for my soil”.

Further, both his green harvest, which takes place in June, and final picking times, fail to follow the normal patterns of the region, but, he said, have been chosen to ensure optimum ripeness levels, while reflecting the character Piedmont’s native grapes grown on his site.

“While some producers might pick early for acidity and others late for sugars, for me it is about round and ripe tannins, I look very carefully at the quality of the tannin.” In fact, Bolmida admitted that he undergoes as many as 13 different analyses of the grape before deciding when to harvest.

More remarkable are his trials in the cellar, where Bolmida employs a simultaneous alcoholic fermentation and carbonic maceration for his Frales Barbera-Nebbiolo blend, which is named after his two children, Francesco and Alessandra.

Meanwhile, for his Barolos, he has increased the Nebbiolo skin contact from 30 to 70 days over the course of the last few vintages, and, realising his research on this is complete, he has now settled on a 60-day maceration. While this is unusually lengthy, the extraction is gentle enough to bring softness, not hard tannins to the wines.

Finally, Bolmida’s maturation process is similarly fastidious and unconventional, and involves barriques for the first year’s ageing of his Barolos – with lees stirring every week for the first two months – followed by an extended period in 3,000 litre cuves, a size limited only by the amount he can make. “I never buy new oak,” Bolmida said, “and I wash out the barriques with [boiling] water before filling because I don’t want any flavour extraction, I just want the micro-oxygenation.”

Concluding, Bolmida stressed: “What is important is to put the wine into the barrel, not the barrel into the wine,” which is no doubt music to the proverbial ears of Piedmont’s most longstanding followers in the UK market and elsewhere.

Patrick Schmitt, 24.02.2011