“The King of Wines” may be in danger of losing its reputation for greatness as a growing number of winemakers create softer, more crowd-pleasing bottlings. Lettie Teague investigates.
Is Barolo still Italy’s greatest wine? It’s a question I’ve been mulling over for some time. And like some of life’s bigger questions (Is there a God? And what really constitutes a 100-point wine?), it’s not one whose answer is readily known.
Barolo, after all, has been called “the King of Wines” for centuries—never mind that it took a Frenchman to bring this about …

A Royal Wine from the Foot of the Alps
Barolo is one of Italy’s noblest wines. Born in the Piedmont region, literally at the foothills of the Alps, it is full-bodied, acidic, redolent of strawberries and violets, and carries the aristocratic DOCG appellation. Indeed, some call it a King among wines.
The wine takes its name from the tiny village of Barolo, one of a cluster of villages in the region, which devotes just around 3000 acres to the Nebbiolo grape, from which Barolo is made. Other villages that make up the …

The first thing that one notices about Barolo is that the town is situated differently than the other nearby towns, which perch on hilltops or stretch along ridges. Barolo, though, closes a small valley; it poses on a kind of spur-shaped plateau, standing out from the slopes that surround it like an amphitheatre.
There is no clear surviving evidence about the beginnings of Barolo. In pre-historic and later eras, the area was certainly inhabited by Celtic-Ligurian tribes, subdued later by the Romans, as well as by the Romans themselves, but it …