Right in the center of Barolo, the building looks a residence, too small to house a winery, but inside there’s a long garden running back, with cellars underneath, extended to two levels. From the garden you can see out over the hills around Barolo.

The winery is behind and underneath an old building in beautiful downtown Barolo

Chiara was one of the “Barolo Boys” who revolutionized winemaking in Barolo in the eighties. “My generation had to face the problem of whether to sell the vineyards and abandon winemaking or to take it back. I was lucky that I was in a group of people who decided to make wine here, I was the youngest, and I was lucky to be included in the group. I was regarded as their mascot because I was the only woman,” Chiara recollects.

Chiara comes from a winemaking family who owned Borgogno, a large traditional producer. After working there with her brothers, she purchased the tiny estate of E. Pira, following the death of Luigi Pira in 1980. With under 5 ha, production was very small, not much over a thousand cases. In 2010 her brother Giorgio left Borgogno and joined her, and that gave them the resources to buy more vineyards, more or less doubling the size of the estate.

She’s definitely a modern winemaker. She started fighting with her father, doing green harvest at night to pass unnoticed, but anyway her father heard from other winemakers—“do you know what your daughter is up to?” She remains dedicated to organic viticulture, to the point of persuading all her neighbors in Cannubi to make the whole Cru organic (no mean feat in Piedmont!). Fermentation is in rotary fermenters and also conventional stainless steel vats, but maceration time has been extended recently, and is now about two weeks. Chiara has moved away from exclusive dependence on barriques, and the cellar also contains botti. “You can get too much taste of oak, this is why I have reduced new oak, today it is one third new, one third one year, and one third older.”

Chiara now uses Botti as well as Barriques

Presently there are six wines: Barbera and Dolcetto, Langhe Nebbiolo (from the Barolo area), and three three Barolos—via Nuova, Mosconi, and Cannubi.All the Barolos used to be from single vineyards, but things changed generally after 2010. “After we bought more vineyards, it was possible to go back to the tradition of assemblage from different vineyards.” Via Nuova used to come from a single plot but lost its name after the classification, so now it is a blend from six small plots in three villages.

One of the most famous vineyards in the Barolo commune, Cannubi has the delicacy that comes from sandy terroir, and is matured half in barriques and half in botti. Mosconi comes from the recent purchase in 2010 of a 4 ha vineyard in Monforte; this gives a more powerful wine and is matured in barriques.

Cannubi is my favorite of Chiara’s Barolos, and a recent experience with an older vintage, the 2001, cast some light for me on modernism. Half of the bottle tasted immediately after opening was like a different wine from the other half tasted the following day. On opening, it was clearly the work of an arch modernist, showing lots of new oak with aromas of vanillin hiding the fruits, although the steely backbone was clear underneath. A day later, the wine reverted to classic type, showing a linear purity of sour red cherry fruits, and a crystalline elegance supported by fresh acidity. It should become increasingly elegant with age.

A sign that the style has backed off a bit in the past decade is that the same experience with the 2011 vintage at the winery in 2016 showed taut precision and freshness on opening, but a rounder impression with more sense of viscosity for a bottle that had been open for a day, suggesting the path of future development. A silky sheen was clear for both, with a sense of underlying minerality. From the Mosconi vineyard, the 40-year-old vines (her oldest) give a warmer, richer wine, firmer and more powerful than Cannubi.