What His Mother Remembered
After Ignazio Alessandria passed, the workers at G.B. Burlotto suggested they stop foot-treading the harvest. It was physically demanding, they said. The oenology schools were recommending destemming. The modern approach would be easier to manage.
So they stopped.
Then Marina — Fabio's mother — started remembering. She remembered that her father-in-law Ignazio's Barolo had tasted different. Better. She could not quantify it technically.
She simply knew.
And when the family traced the quality backwards, through the changes in the cellar, through the shift in methods, whole cluster fermentation and foot-treading were what they kept returning to.
So Fabio brought it back. Not to every wine — he is precise about where the approach is warranted — but to Monvigliero, where the grape and tannin quality reward the method. He stands in the fermentation vat and treads the harvest with his own weight, in the most archaic possible gesture, because his mother remembered that the wine was better when his grandfather did it that way.
There is a word in Italian for this kind of transmission: tramandare — to hand down. Not instruction. Not recipe. Memory passed through the body, arriving eventually as a decision.
G.B. Burlotto has been in Verduno since the late 18th century. Fabio is the fifth generation.
His children Alberto and Emma are the sixth.
