Why it matters
The producer
In the village of Treiso, the highest and smallest of the three communes in the Barbaresco production zone, the Nada family has farmed the same hillside parcel for 126 years. The cru is called Casot. The family purchased it on 27 March 1900 from the Gaja estate, a transaction that anchors the house's claim to one of the oldest continuously owned addresses in the appellation.
For six decades the family sold their grapes in bulk. Estate bottling began in 1964, in the old Casot farmhouse. The cellar expanded from 1968 onward. Today the estate produces roughly 50,000 bottles a year across a range that runs from Barbaresco to a white blend and, unexpectedly, a Riesling.
Place and vineyards
Where the wines begin
Treiso sits at the southern edge of the Barbaresco triangle, higher and cooler than the village of Barbaresco itself or the commune of Neive to the north. That elevation shapes the ripening curve: Nebbiolo picks up later, holds more acidity, and develops a darker, drier fruit profile than lower-lying Barbaresco vineyards. The wines carry more grip and take longer to open.
The Casot cru occupies a steep hillside within Treiso. Steep slopes in Piedmont mean poor, thin soil, natural drainage, and concentrated fruit from vines that work hard. The parcel has no irrigation and no history of heavy intervention. These are the physical conditions that give Barbaresco from this address its particular character: taut, dark, and slow to give.
In the cellar
Vineyards and cellar
The Casot vineyard is farmed for Nebbiolo, the only grape permitted in Barbaresco DOCG. Enrico works without added sulphites during the critical intervention points: alcoholic fermentation runs with ambient yeasts only, maceration proceeds without sulphite addition, and malolactic conversion follows the same rule. Sulphites are used at reduced levels only during the aging phase.
In the cellar, the vessels are large, untoasted Slavonian and Allier oak barrels and vats maintained over decades. Untoasted means no charring of the inner stave surface: the wood does not contribute vanilla, caramel, or toast flavour to the wine. Old vessels mean the oak is spent as a flavour donor. The function of the wood is oxidative management and slow micro-oxygenation over a long aging period, not flavour addition. The Barbaresco has no wood character in the glass.
Wines to know
The range in view
The range runs to five or six wines and stays rooted in the single commune. Barbaresco Casot is the flagship: 100% Nebbiolo from the family's historic parcel, fermented with ambient yeasts, aged in large untoasted oak, and released only when the estate considers it ready. It carries dark red fruit flanked by spice, dried flowers, and a balsamic thread, with tannins and a persistent finish. The estate puts optimal expression at six to eight years from bottling, with further development possible to twenty-five or thirty years. This is a wine for a cellar, not an impulse purchase.
A second Barbaresco cru sits in the range alongside Casot. Like Casot it is 100% Nebbiolo and follows the same large-oak aging regime.
A useful way in
A bottle to begin with
Barbaresco Casot is where the estate's full argument lives. It is 100% Nebbiolo from the Casot vineyard in Treiso, fermented with ambient yeasts and no added sulphites, and aged in large, untoasted, decades-old oak that leaves no flavour of its own in the wine. It shows dark red fruit, firm tannin, dried flowers, spice, and balsamic depth on a finish that does not drop. Open it at six years from the vintage at earliest. At eight it is more itself. Buy two bottles if you can: one now to understand where it is going, one in a decade to understand where it arrived.