Michele Chiarlo - Airone Del Monferrato 2006 Ml. 750

The Chiarlo style has always that of producing greatly elegant and complex wines with a propensity to excellent longevity whilst, at the same time, featuring all the characteristics of the well-cultivated vineyards and high quality soil from which they claim their origin.
In the cellar, winemakers Stefano Chiarlo and Gianni Meleni pursue the goal of being faithful to the Chiarlo style: a moderate and careful use of wood for their red wines so that the varietal and the soil characteristics remain evident.
As for the Gavi, besides a particularly highly-vocated location, it is crucial that the yield of this generous Cortese grape is lowered, while one of our prerogatives in the cellar is a partial cryomaceration of the grapes.
From the south of Asti comes another of our extraordinarily successful white wines, the Moscato d'Asti, a highly aromatic wine that comes from the vocated hills with a white-sandy soil rich in micronutrients.
These features create a wine which is fairly pulpy and delicate, with a fresh citrus note which makes it very inviting and pleasant.
Among the red wines, we attach particular importance to the Barbera d'Asti, a wine that we have revolutionised, starting from the 1970s, by being the first to introduce malolactic fermentation.
Since the end of the 1980s we then managed to raise its quality thanks to the reduction in the yields in the vineyard, bringing forth an excellently structured and harmonious wine with very evident notes of red fruit, accompanied by an attractive silkiness and freshness. This long and arduous work has enabled us to be the producers that first introduced quality Barbera d'Asti into fifty-odd new markets.
Still in the 1980s, Michele Chiarlo worked tenaciously together with other prestigious producers to raise the level of the noble Barolo, making it less austere and with smoother tannins, but always mintaining intact its original characteristics and extraordinary longevity. For our Barolo the determining factor in the vineyard was the drastic reduction in the grape bunches, while in the cellar the fundamental thing was controlling the temperature of fermentation and reducing the musts contact with the skins to 15-17 days.
The Tortoniano's refinement in wood occurs exclusively in large barrels, whereas for the crus 700-litre barrels are used, of which 50% new; this style of production was introduced by us in 1988 and has never changed.