Why it matters
The producer
Ceretto started without a single vine. In the 1930s, Riccardo Ceretto ran a merchant operation, buying grapes, making wine, and selling it without the asset that would later define everything the family built. When his sons Bruno and Marcello entered the business, they looked at the Langhe differently. They saw hillside parcels with names, each producing something distinct, and they began the work of owning them.
The two brothers spent the 1960s mapping the land they wanted and purchasing it parcel by parcel. By 1974 they had enough to make an argument that most Piedmontese producers were not yet making: that the vineyard mattered more than the appellation average. They put the names Brunate, Prapò, and Bricco Rocche on their Barolo labels and the Bricco Asili name on their Barbaresco. It was one of the earliest commercial releases of single-vineyard Barolo and Barbaresco from any producer in the region.
Place and vineyards
Where the wines begin
Barolo and Barbaresco are both Piemonte appellations built around Nebbiolo, but they sit on different geology and belong to different communes. Barolo lies south and west of Alba, its vineyards spread across townships that include La Morra and Serralunga d'Alba. La Morra sits on younger Tortonian soils, pale and calcareous, that tend to produce Nebbiolo with generous fruit and relatively accessible tannin in youth. Serralunga d'Alba sits on older, harder Helvetian soils that give firmer, more compact wine requiring more time to open.
Barbaresco lies northeast of Alba along the Tanaro river, with its named vineyards concentrated around the village of Barbaresco. The appellation typically ripens a little earlier than Barolo and its wines often show slightly softer tannin at comparable ages, though the finest sites can age for decades.
In the cellar
Vineyards and cellar
Organic farming across the full 160 hectares means no synthetic herbicides or pesticides in the vineyards. The transition took five years and covered all Ceretto parcels in Barolo, Barbaresco, and the broader Langhe.
In the cellar, Alessandro's pied de cuve method uses a small culture propagated from each vineyard's own grapes to start fermentation naturally. Fermentation and skin maceration run approximately 20 days. The skin contact extracts tannin and colour from Nebbiolo's thick skins while the ambient yeasts work more slowly than selected strains, giving a longer fermentation curve that the family believes preserves more of the fruit and site character in the finished wine.
Wines to know
The range in view
Ceretto's range is built around Nebbiolo in two appellations, with a clear vertical hierarchy in both.
The estate Barolo assembles fruit from multiple parcels, principally the lower Brunate slopes along with smaller contributions from other holdings. It is the widest-reaching expression in the range, rounder and more accessible in younger vintages than the single-vineyard bottles above it.
A useful way in
A bottle to begin with
Start with the Ceretto Barolo, the estate-level bottle assembled principally from the lower Brunate parcel. It is not a single-vineyard wine, but it draws its character from La Morra, the softer, more approachable side of the appellation. On the nose, dried cherry and rose with a thread of tar and balsamic. In the mouth, the acidity is firm and clean, the tannin round enough to drink without extended cellaring, and the finish long and dry. It tells you what Nebbiolo does in the Langhe without the tighter, more demanding tannin of the Serralunga bottles. Once you understand what the estate is doing with the grape and the soil, Brunate is the natural next step.