419: Beppe Colla is one of the Founding Fathers of Barolo

I'll Drink to That! Wine Talk

Levi Dalton

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4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2017

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Beppe Colla, who was born in 1930, literally defined what Barolo is today through his work at the Prunotto winery in the Piemonte of Italy.

Beppe Colla was one of the first to introduce single vineyard Barolo to consumers, and he helped lay down the guidelines that shape the wines of the region today. This is a rare interview with Beppe Colla, who is now blind and lives in retirement.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.
0:05.1	I'm Levy Dalton.
0:06.1	I'm Erin Scala and here's our show today. Oh, Bepe Cola is in his mid-80s today and functionally blind. He is also one of the people who
0:30.0	literally defined Barolo as we understand it today, both in his work for several decades
0:34.8	at the Punoto Winery, where he was one of the very first to release a single vineyard Barolo,
0:39.6	actually quite a few of those, and in his contribution to the Appalachian rules for the region as a whole.
0:46.1	At the time, when there are only a handful of trained analogous to working in the Pimante,
0:50.8	Kola was a key figure, and he was a pivotal one for the place.
0:54.0	He has also been very open all throughout his career about what he does and what he knows.
1:00.0	This is author and critic Michael Garner who wrote the book Barolo, Tar and Roses on his early impressions of Bepe Cola.
1:08.0	Yeah, we learned a lot from him and he was very, very frank, very open and very honest with us.
1:15.0	He admitted that part way through his winemaking career,
1:20.0	he learned there was something called an anelactic fermentation and he didn't try and hide that and that was a characteristic which at the time perhaps wasn't that common a lot of Langeroli back then were very closed and you know didn't really
1:37.2	didn't really want to sort of share too much with people. He was he was quite the opposite.
1:43.0	One of the things that makes Bepecola so unique today is that while the Pimante has changed a great deal,
1:49.0	there are very few people living who can talk about the vintages of the 1950s with any sort of first-hand detail.
1:56.2	But beyond the conditions of those harvests, COLA can also speak to the conditions of the time
2:00.5	in that place.
2:02.1	This is cartographer and writer Alessandro Masnagetti on why he values
2:06.2	Bepe Kola so much.
2:09.2	The most important thing about Bepe is that he can tell you a story about wine.
2:19.0	Yes, but he can tell you even more stories about people and tradition and this is the most important thing because he is a living heritage and you cannot understand that style of wine without thinking at that era, at that age, what were the relationship between a
	...

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