The Citadels
Giuseppe Rinaldi
The Rinaldi family did not choose their vineyards. They earned them.
In the mid-1800s, the Marchesi Falletti di Barolo—the noble house that had first elevated Nebbiolo into a wine fit for kings—began to fade. As the dynasty dissolved, the farmhands who had spent generations working their land did something remarkable: they scraped together what little they had and bought the fields they had labored in for decades. Battista Rinaldi was one of them. He came away with parcels in Brunate, Le Coste, and eventually Cannubi San Lorenzo and Ravera.
This is not a founding story of vision or ambition. It is a story of attachment.
These men did not buy the land because they believed in terroir as philosophy. They bought it because it was theirs in every way that mattered—they had cut it, tended it, understood its moods across every season. The legal transaction was almost incidental. The relationship had been forming for generations.
From that original act of rootedness, the Giuseppe Rinaldi estate was formally established in 1890. Six generations later, it remains one of the smallest, most uncompromising, most quietly defiant estates in all of Barolo.
The Vet Who Became a Winemaker
For much of his adult life, Giuseppe "Beppe" Rinaldi worked as a veterinarian.
He did not run the family cellar. His father Battista—the same name passing like a baton through generations—managed the estate after training with distinction at the enological school of Alba, later serving as the Mayor of Barolo from 1970 to 1975. It was only when Battista passed away in 1992 that Beppe stepped fully into the role.
He was already a man formed by other disciplines. He brought a scientist's eye and a farmer's hands. He brought stubbornness, humor, and a deep suspicion of fashion.
What he did not bring was doubt.
He immediately restored his grandfather's approach: blending across multiple MGAs rather than vinifying them separately. While the wider Barolo world was moving towards single-vineyard wines—chasing the market's romance with specificity, with cru names as luxury signals—Beppe moved in the opposite direction.
He believed the wine was more complete as a conversation between sites than as a monologue from one.
This was not nostalgia. It was a position.
The Four Citadels
The Rinaldi holdings are organized around four vineyard sites, each a distinct geological and topographical character:
Brunate, straddling the communes of Barolo and La Morra, sits on the soft, bluish-grey Tortonian marls. It is one of the most celebrated crus in the denomination—aromatic, structured, with a floral lift that distinguishes it from the denser wines of Serralunga.
Le Coste, on the western edge of the commune of Barolo, contributes finesse and elegance. Its soils share the Tortonian character, but with slightly different exposition, producing wines of delicacy and length.
Cannubi San Lorenzo, lying within the storied Cannubi hill, adds the mid-palate generosity and the smooth, silky tannin structure for which that great cru is known.
Ravera, in the commune of Novello, sits on younger Helvetian soils and contributes freshness, aromatic complexity, and a structural backbone that keeps the blend from collapsing into early comfort.
Together, these four sites form what I think of as the four walls of a citadel—each one load-bearing, each one contributing something the others cannot.
The Law That Forced a New Name
In 2010, the DOCG regulations changed. Wines could no longer carry two cru names on a single label.
For most producers, this was an administrative inconvenience. For Beppe Rinaldi, who had built his entire philosophy around multi-vineyard blends, it was a direct challenge to the integrity of his work. He could comply by choosing one dominant vineyard name and blending in up to 15% from others. Or he could do something else entirely.
He did both—and neither.
He retained the Brunate designation for one wine, blending in up to 15% Le Coste. And for the blend of Le Coste, Cannubi San Lorenzo, and Ravera—the three remaining sites—he created a new label: Tre Tine.
Three vats. Three sites. One wine.
The name is not romantic. It is almost deliberately prosaic. It does not invoke a hill or a history. It invokes a method—three separate fermentations, in three separate tini, brought together into a single Barolo that carries the geometry of its making in its name.
This is Rinaldi's character made visible: when the law forces compromise, find the path that turns the constraint into a statement.
After Beppe
Giuseppe "Beppe" Rinaldi passed away in 2018.
His daughter Marta, who trained as an enologist at the same school of Alba that her great-grandfather once attended, now tends the estate with the same principles and the same vineyards. The fermentations still happen in large, neutral oak and concrete. The macerations are still long. The botti are still big, old, and Slavonian.
Nothing has been modernized to prove continuity. The work itself proves it.
There is something deeply stoic in this inheritance. Marta did not receive a set of instructions. She received a set of values—expressed in wood, vine, and the stubborn refusal to separate the method from the message.
The estate now produces roughly 10,000 bottles of Brunate and 3,500 bottles of Tre Tine per year. In a world of scaled production and global distribution, these are almost devotional quantities. Enough to be real. Not enough to become a brand.
That, too, is a position.
What the Citadels Teach
Standing in the Rinaldi cellar in the village of Barolo, surrounded by barrels that dwarf the room, you feel the weight of a coherent life.
Not a simple life. Not an easy life. But a coherent one—where the philosophy of the wine and the philosophy of the man were the same thing, and where what was passed to the daughter was not technique but conviction.
The lesson of this estate is not about winemaking.
It is about the courage to hold your position when the market rewards compliance.
It is about understanding that what you blend together—the sites, the soils, the seasons—creates something more truthful than any single element can achieve alone.
And it is about the deep, quiet confidence of a family that bought their land from a dying dynasty and spent six generations proving that the attachment was worth more than the price they paid.
Integrity is the refusal to be rushed.
// Arnt
