Ep 613: The Grape Mini-Series Refresh -- Nebbiolo

Wine for Normal People

Arts, Food

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 July 2026

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Summary

Nebbiolo is one of the oldest and finest red grapes of Italy. Native to Piemonte (Piedmont) in the northwest of the country, it was first mentioned and described by (my boyfriend) Pliny the Elder in the first century AD. After a time of being known exclusively on its home turf, starting in the 1700s, Nebbiolo began to gain status as a wine of Piemontese royalty. When a dry version was made in the mid-1800s, the wine's place as a great of the wine world was cemented.

Nebbiolo sparkles in the epic wines of Barolo and Barbaresco, along with other neighboring areas. But it's not a good traveler. Others have tried to grow it and make wine from it, but the magic of Nebbiolo is often elusive. So it remains small. With less than 15,000 acres/ 6,070 ha of Nebbiolo planted globally, this is a rare grape and we are lucky to have access to it!

Photo: Nebbiolo grape in the Langhe. Source: https://www.langhevini.it/en/i-vitigni-del-territorio/nebbiolo/

In this show, as in all grape miniseries, I talk about the history of the grape, how it behaves in the vineyard and winery, there terroir that best suits it, and the places it is grown. I also talk about climate change and what that will mean for Nebbiolo in the future (I'm hopeful. There are lots of options in Barolo and Barbaresco, so don't get all gloom and doom!).

If you've never had a Nebbiolo from Piedmont, please do yourself a favor and get one. It's unlike anything else in this world – pure magic in a glass when it's from a good producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Wine for Normal People, the podcast for people who like wine, but not the snobbery that goes with it.
0:15.7	I'm your host Elizabeth Schneider, author of the Wine for Normal People book and certified wine dork.
0:21.4	Have you checked out my new sponsor, Grapes the Wine Company?
0:26.2	It's grapesthewineco.com.
0:29.5	We have lots of exciting things coming up, including wines for the classes and some
0:34.7	offerings and suggested wines that go with the podcast.
0:38.1	Daniel Poser is my friend.
0:39.5	He has been on the show and he's in New York, which means that if the wine is available
0:43.8	in the U.S., he can get it for us.
0:45.6	Grapes, thewineco.com, and listen in the middle of the show for more details.
0:50.2	This is a grape mini-series refresh, and this is definitely needed, if nothing else, to just remind us of how significant nebolo is.
1:03.1	And also, with the acceleration of climate change and how it's hitting the major areas for nebolo so hard, it is nice for us to maybe start
1:13.4	thinking of some other places to look for this grape.
1:17.5	Now, I don't think that it's all gloom and doom.
1:20.7	Obviously, Mother Nature is going to win this battle, and we are not really helping it as humans and we are accelerating climate
1:29.3	change. But I do think that human ingenuity and also the adaptability of grapes is going to
1:35.9	help us keep grapes like Nebulae around, although we may have to get creative about where we grow it
1:42.7	and how we grow it. So there's that as an open-ended question. We have to get creative about where we grow it and how we grow it.
1:44.2	So there's that as an open-ended question.
1:47.6	We have to take care of our business before we get started on Nebolo.
1:53.8	A couple things, I'm going to remind you again, and I will probably remind you in every show
1:57.9	that there are recorded versions of the online Wine for Normal
	...

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