Who we are
I was born in the north, but part of me has always belonged to the south. My childhood was Lofoten: cold seas, dark winters, a print shop that smelled of ink and metal, and a boy who spent hours turning broken toys into Roman centurions. I didn’t have the words for it then, but I was already drawn to the same things that move me now: history, craft, and the quiet beauty of human hands shaping meaning from imperfection.
Years later, I discovered why the pull felt so strong. My mother’s lineage traces back to a Venetian shipwreck in 1432, when Italian sailors were carried north by the Gulf Stream and washed ashore in the Arctic. Most returned home. Two stayed. One became my ancestor. When I finally stood in Italy as a teenager, I didn’t feel like a tourist. I felt like someone who had taken a long time to come back.
In 2011, in a small Norwegian wine shop, I chose a bottle of Barolo for a reason that had nothing to do with scores or vintages. I chose it because of a label. Borgogno: elegant, restrained, confident. It suggested history without shouting about it. When I opened the bottle, I realised I was tasting something I couldn’t name. Not fruit, not oak, but time made liquid. It stayed with me.
Six years later, in 2017, I made a quiet pilgrimage to Barolo. In the Borgogno cellars, in front of a 120‑year‑old chestnut barrel still in active use, I tasted seven vintages back to 1981. Standing in that cool, breathing darkness, something clicked into place. Barolo wasn’t just a wine. It was a way of seeing. Patience, restraint, multi‑generational responsibility—bottled. I left the region knowing that at some point, I would have to try to honour what I had seen.
Professionally, I have spent three decades working as a brand strategist, creative director, and photographer for global companies—Google, Meta, PayPal, American Express, and more. My work has been to translate complexity into emotion, to help organisations understand that what people remember is not campaigns but how they were made to feel. Barolo is, in a way, the purest version of that lesson. No slogans. No launches. Just families, hillsides, barrels, and time.
Barolo — The Sweet Spot of Time is my attempt to pay attention properly. It is not a wine guide. It is a meditation on patience, craft, and devotion told through three custodians of the Langhe: the vignaiolo in the hills, the nonna in the kitchen, and the truffle hunter in the forest. Together, they show how time becomes taste, and why in a culture obsessed with speed and visibility, the real luxury is often what no one can rush.
This website is the working notebook for that project. Here you will not find tasting notes or ranking tables. Instead, you will find letters from the hills and cellars, from Sunday kitchens and autumn forests. Small stories about pruning decisions that echo far beyond a single vintage, about truffle dogs whose silence teaches more than most meetings, about nonnas who keep entire histories alive in the way they salt a pot of water.
I write slowly, because the subject deserves it. Some of what appears here will eventually find its way into the book. Some will remain only as these fragments, traces of walks, conversations, and glasses of wine shared at wooden tables. All of it is guided by a simple conviction:
Time is the real luxury, because everything else can be borrowed, except patience.
If you would like to walk these hills with me—at their pace, not the internet’s—you are welcome to stay, read, and receive the occasional letter from the sweet spot of time.
// Arnt
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