Cantina del Pino

Whole clusters in the ferment

Whole clusters go into the ferment in small measure at Cantina del Pino in Langhe, a gesture that came from Renato Vacca, the estate’s founder and winemaker in Barbaresco. It was not a break with Barbaresco discipline; it sat inside it. Vacca trained at the School of enology in Alba, then worked as winemaker at Produttori del Barbaresco until 1997 before he and the family began bottling their own estate wines at Cantina del Pino. He guided the estate with a soft touch, blending traditional methods with subtle innovations such as the inclusion of whole clusters in fermentation. Vacca died in March 2020 at the age of 51, and the estate is carried forward today by his wife. The bench is Ovello hill, where the Vacca family’s holdings carry a longer local memory: Domizio Cavazza established the original vineyard holdings in the Ovello area in 1894, and Vacca’s great-grandfather bought the property from Cavazza’s son in the 1920s.

The modern estate label began in 1997, after the family moved from grape-selling into full winemaking. That shift matters because Cantina del Pino is not built around purchased fruit or a broad regional blend. It works from its own vineyards, with Nebbiolo at the center and Barbera and Dolcetto close by. The signature runs through site-named Barbaresco bottlings, Ovello, Albesani and Gallina, wines that keep the family’s work tied to named ground rather than cellar style alone.

Seven hectares on Ovello hill

The method starts before the cellar, on 7 hectares around Ovello hill. The farming is sustainable, without chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides, and the estate works entirely with its own fruit. Calcareous marl, sandstone and clay give the site its structure; cool nights and slope drainage help Nebbiolo ripen slowly enough to hold tannin, scent and line. In the cellar, fermentation takes place in stainless steel, preserving the primary character of the fruit before each wine follows its own aging path.

The Langhe Nebbiolo 2023 stays in stainless steel for eight months, a choice that keeps the wine closer to its youthful fruit and spice. The Barbaresco wines move more slowly, with fermentation around 30 days in stainless steel before extended aging in traditional oak barrels. That sequence gives the wines extraction without forcing them into new-oak polish. The whole-cluster inclusion remains a small, deliberate adjustment, used for texture and aromatic lift within a traditional Barbaresco frame.

The cellar below the vines

The place reads as a family winery before it reads as a tasting address. The cellar belongs to the slope around it, and the vineyard is never far from the conversation. Ovello is the fixed point: fruit comes in from the hill, steel carries the ferment, oak takes the Barbaresco into its longer rest. The noise is low, as it tends to be in cellars where the work has already been decided by pruning, harvest and sorting.

In the tasting room, the difference between Langhe Nebbiolo and Barbaresco is not presented as a hierarchy so much as time made visible. One wine keeps the immediacy of steel. Another asks for barrel and bottle. The family’s next statement is still the same named ground, written most clearly in Barbaresco Ovello.