This Barbaresco is small, but very fine!

Cigliuti is a small, charming family business in the Serrabulla cru that produces Barbaresco of outstanding quality. Due to their small production volume and widespread name recognition, this red wine from Piedmont is hard to come by! Fortunately, we managed to get our hands on a small batch of their top Barbaresco! What a beautiful wine that Cigliuti Barbaresco Serrabulla is! Wow, top class! Many vintages already received 3 glasses in the Italian wine guide Gambero Rosso, to name just one example.

The Cigliuti Barbaresco Serraboella is cherry red and still reasonably transparent. On the nose, it is ethereal, floating, and still a little hidden for this young version. However, there are already notes of cherries (cherry coke), some licorice, tar, mushrooms, and earthy tones on the nose. The power but also finesse (especially in this top vintage of 2016) is currently still kept in check by its youth. On the palate, a very soft start followed by an explosion of juice and concentration with cocoa, licorice, and cherries again. Next, the acidity and tannins break free: in the young wine, these are still somewhat detached from the wine and are therefore still prominently present. About six years after the harvest, the harmony begins to become clearer and the mouthfeel becomes more refined. Enormous finish; a wine for aging par excellence.

Renato Cigliuti

To those who ask Renato Cigliuti what the secret to the quality of his wines is, he keeps repeating that it is the land: “this blessed land with these vineyards where I was born”. Renato Cigliuti continues the business with his family with passion and dedication, preferring a rustic approach without forcing anything. The vineyard is his habitat: a generous land, vineyards with orderly rows. In the southwest of the estate’s vineyards, with limestone, Dolcetto and Nebbiolo are grown, while in the southeast, where the soil is clayey, Barbera is cultivated.

At Cigliuti, they have been cultivating grapes and hazelnuts for centuries. They have been bottling the wine themselves since 1964, and Renato Cigliuti is the fourth generation to now own the company (currently together with his daughters Claudia and Silvia). Cigliuti is situated on the Serrabulla hill (a cru in the Barbaresco area) in the village of Neive. This hill offers two magnificent terroirs! The dry soil on the southwest side of this steep hill, which contains a lot of limestone, is ideal for the planting of Nebbiolo. Barbera is located on the eastern side of Serraboella, where the soil contains a higher proportion of clay. The family lives at the estate, which stands atop the hill, and thus enjoys a magnificent view of the vineyards.

The wines are highly regarded internationally among connoisseurs, but are little known to the general public due to the small number of bottles produced: only 30,000 per year. In short: very high quality and hard to come by! To all Nebbiolo lovers we say: Seize the opportunity!