Wine Wednesday Recap: Cascina Fontana 2016 & The Soul of Piedmont 🇮🇹🍷
A 10-year-old traditionalist Barolo from a tiny 5-hectare estate, rarely found outside Europe.
On yesterday’s Wine Wednesday, winemaker Annabelle Borra (Vinos de Bellite)and I logged on to escape a wave of mid-June humidity and talk weather before diving face-first into one of the most revered terroirs in the world: Piedmont. While Annabelle was sipping a 2020 Barolo from the large-scale house of Sordo to stay on theme, we spent 25 minutes exploring the absolute antithesis of commercial winemaking.
If you missed the live stream, here is your technical recap of the legendary library vintage that is releasing to our members later today.
The Drop: Cascina Fontana Barolo 2016
Back in April, we did a highly acclaimed library release from the Lamora sub-region. Today, we are returning to the iconic, perennially legendary 2016 vintage with an allocation from Cascina Fontana—a tiny, fiercely traditionalist family producer managing just 5 hectares of land.
The Modernist Trend: Utilizing smaller French oak barrels to artificially speed up the wine’s approachability.
The Cascina Fontana Approach: Sticking to six generations of tradition with native fermentations, large traditional Slovenian oak casks, and partial aging in raw concrete to retain absolute freshness.
The Six-Generation Tradition: Run with the exact uncompromising winemaking techniques passed down from father to grandfather, this estate stands as a proud standard-bearer for traditionalist Barolo. They employ purely native fermentations with zero filtering or clarifying, keeping the raw “life” of the wine fully intact.
The Concrete Element: Rather than utilizing small French oak barriques (a major point of contention in the historical “Barolo Wars”), the Fontana family ages their Nebbiolo in large Slovenian oak casks alongside a partial aging period in raw concrete. This technique infuses the final wine with a striking, pure layer of freshness and aromatic complexity.
The Temperamental “Heartbreak Grape”: Barolo is strictly legally required to be 100% Nebbiolo—a notoriously difficult, thin-skinned, and late-ripening variety. Since it absorbs the micro-nuances of the soil so aggressively, winemakers created the MGA (Menzioni Geografiche Aggiuntive) classification mapping system. This allows seasoned tasters to blindly identify exactly which hill and soil structure the grape was plucked from.
The Direct-from-Estate Library Play: This allocation is a true “library release,” meaning it has been resting flawlessly inside the estate’s private cellars for a decade before being shipped directly to our facilities at Bordeaux City Bond. It possesses massive structural tannins and high acidity built to age beautifully for decades to come.
The allocation hits the members’ mailbox later today in highly limited three-bottle lots. This is an incredibly rare opportunity for collectors across the Atlantic; because Cascina Fontana’s production is so small, nearly the entire vintage is consumed locally by people in Piedmont, rarely making it out of Europe.
Perfect Pairings: Northern Italian Rustic Comfort 🍽️
Nebbiolo’s aggressive structural tannins and crisp acidity act like sandpaper on the tongue when young, requiring either intense aeration or a serious food matrix to shine. If you are opening one of your bottles soon, we recommend uncorking it at least two hours in advance.
For the ultimate culinary match, lean heavily into rustic northern comfort foods. Think long, slow-roasted lamb or beef dishes, rich stews, and anything featuring shaved black or white truffles. What grows together always goes together.
Want the full broadcast replay? Watch the live video here: https://dvin.app/FortanaBarolo
Cheers,
Jana
Co-founder, dVIN Labs 🍷