Mascarello

Piemontese stalwart steeped in tradition

The Mascarello family has produced Barolo since 1881. That makes them elder statesmen in the Piemontese winemaking fraternity and they bring much-needed constancy to a region obsessed with the latest fashions. These are wines that are made in the vineyard. Manual weeding, rigorous crop thinning and an exceptionally late harvest all combine to create raw material of the very highest quality. In the cellar, the grapes are treated to lengthy macerations and even longer maturation in Slavonian botte. Such traditional techniques imbue the wines with a velvety approachability in their youth and the capacity to acquire weight and complexity as they age. Mauro Mascarello - now in his 80s – is slowly handing over the winemaking reins to his children, Giuseppe and Elena. Change is slow here and, in my book, that’s a very good thing. All of the Mascarello wines are now on allocation which is, sadly, decreasing every year.