The fog was still lying in the Tanaro valley when I turned off the road below Barbaresco at 08:50 and climbed toward Località Paglieri. The tower of the village, visible from half the Langhe on a clear day, had gone. It was the first week of November in Piedmont, north-west Italy, a month after the Nebbiolo harvest, and the vineyards had turned the colour of a fox. Luca Roagna stood at the end of a row with wet boots and a thermos, and offered me the coffee before he offered me his hand.
We did not go into the cellar. We went into the grass.
Since 1880 at Paglieri#
The Roagna family has made dry wine on this hill in the Barbaresco commune since 1880; the estate’s formal name is still Azienda Agricola I Paglieri. A second cellar and a second set of vines sit at Castiglione Falletto, in the Barolo zone, so the family works about 15 hectares, half Barbaresco, half Barolo. Alfredo Roagna is the father. Luca, his son, has led the winemaking since the 2000s and began bottling single vineyards in 2004. No consulting oenologist, no outside agronomist: the decisions are made by people whose surname is on the label.
I met the wine long before the man. A cook I worked with in my kitchen years opened a Pajé at the end of a shift, poured it into water glasses and said nothing. Pale, roses and tar, and a tannin that outlasted the conversation. I wrote the name on the back of an order pad, and it took me a decade to stand in the vineyard it came from.
Grass, woods and vines older than the vigneron#
The first thing you notice at Paglieri is that the rows are green underneath. Permanent grass cover, never a herbicide, and the woods that ring the parcels are left standing. Luca calls the woods the vineyard’s neighbours, and what lives in them works for free. In November the grass was to my ankles and soaked through my shoes in a minute.
The vines are old, and new plantings come from massal selection: cuttings from the best old plants on the property rather than nursery clones, so the vineyard keeps its own genetics. The oldest parcels go into the wines labelled Vecchie Viti, old vines. In Barbaresco the estate holds Pajé, the hill we were standing on, and Montefico, and 0.22 hectares of Asili, a plot I could walk in the time it takes to say the name. Crichët Pajé, the crest of the Pajé hill, comes from vines over 60 years old. At Castiglione Falletto the family holds Pira and less than half a hectare of Rocche di Castiglione planted in the 1960s and 70s.
Barbaresco sits lower and warmer than Barolo, 150 to 400 metres against 200 to 500, and the rules ask 26 months of ageing instead of 38; Castiglione Falletto is on older, harder Serravallian marl and sandstone. Same grape, same hands, half an hour apart, and the wines are recognisably siblings and recognisably different. That comparison is the whole reason I bring people here.
Sixty days under a submerged cap#
Then the cellar, where Roagna becomes an argument about time.
Nebbiolo at Paglieri ferments with wild yeasts and macerates for 60 to 70 days with a submerged cap: a lattice holds the skins under the surface of the wine, so instead of punching down or pumping over, the extraction happens slowly, on its own, for two months. Most red wines spend one to three weeks on their skins. Two months sounds brutal and is the opposite; tannin drawn out at that pace is long and fine rather than hard. Then the wine goes into large old botti, the big casks of the Langhe, for around five years, and release comes years after the harvest. Nobody at Roagna is in a hurry, and the wines taste like it.
“The wine is ready when it stops changing quickly,” Luca said, knocking on a botte with two knuckles. “I do not decide that. I check.”
Roagna does not sell itself as natural wine, and the word you hear in the cellar is tradition. But the practice, grass cover, no herbicides, wild yeasts, old wood, no consultant, sits closer to the growers I visit in Friuli than the label suggests. It is the case I keep making in what I pour: the interesting line is not natural against classic, it is patient against impatient. The family says every bottle is picked up at least six times by a family member before it leaves. I have not counted, but I believe it.
One glass: Barbaresco Pajé 2016#
We tasted standing, in the cellar, at 13 °C by the thermometer on the wall.
Beside it Luca opened Montefico from the same year, darker, more mineral, more closed, a wine for the next decade, and a splash of Barolo Pira from Castiglione Falletto, which showed what harder soils do: more grip, more spine, less perfume. I asked about Solea, the Chardonnay, and got a smile and a promise for next time.
Tajarin and a truffle in the village#
Lunch was five minutes away in the village, a trattoria with a paper tablecloth and a view of the tower, back in place once the fog burnt off around 11:00. Carne cruda battuta al coltello, beef cut by hand to the size of rice grains, with the estate’s Dolcetto d’Alba, soft, bitter-almond, gone in ten minutes. Then tajarin, the thin egg noodles of the Langhe, plain in butter, and a man with a white truffle and a shaver who did not ask how much. The Pajé went from the tasting glass to the table and was better there; a piece of aged Castelmagno finished the bottle.
We talked about the woods, about a vineyard in a wet spring when you do not spray, and about which botte is the oldest. Luca answers technical questions completely and volunteers no opinions about anyone else, which I respect in a winemaker and try to imitate in a guide.
Roagna on tour#
Roagna is the fourth morning of my Piedmont tour, the day the group moves from Alba to Barbaresco with the bags in the minibus at 09:30. By then they have tasted Barolo from Vergne, La Morra and Serralunga, so when Pajé and Montefico stand side by side they know what the lower, warmer hill means in the glass. The visit is by appointment and I arrange it months ahead. Lunch is in the village, then the Torre di Barbaresco and a bed among the vines.
Anyone who wants to see what two months on the skins does to a red should also see what six months does to a white: the growers of Oslavia on my Friuli and Collio route are the sequel. For the geology and the rules of the Langhe, read the Piedmont guide; for the rest of the country, the Italy guide.
Wear boots. The grass is wet at Paglieri until noon most of the year, and Luca will walk you through it either way.
I drove back to Alba a little under the limit, the Alps standing along the northern horizon where the fog had been. Some cellars slow you down for the rest of the day.
