Woody notes.

More new wood for our Nizza docg wines, which will soon become five.
Only 500-litre tonneaux and all made by Botti Gamba, for a variety of reasons.

  • The wood matures for 40 months. (Much longer maturing outdoors results in mitigated release of tannin.)
  • The possibility to choose wood from different forests - Vosges, Fontainebleau, Cher, Allier etc, to achieve the best possible combination of vintage/vineyard/oak.
  • Gamba is from Asti (which is really, really important😁)
  • The overall quality is, of course, excellent.

Here at Cascina Garitina we have made considerable changes in the way we use wood over the years: having used exclusively French barriques until 2007, we then switched to 500-litre tonneaux, and recently we have started to increase the percentage of new wood.

Why increase the amount of new wood when some people would consider this an outdated choice?

Well, first of all, because new wood guarantees better olfactory clarity and essentiality of the wines.
Secondly, new wood is better able to balance the great structure of recent Barbera wines, and, above all, it amalgamates perfectly with the acidity that we have done our best to preserve in the vineyard and in the cellar in recent years.


It is an ill-conceived cliché that new wood mars wines, whereas all too often it is old or exhausted wood that conveys strange, harsh, tannic and green notes to them.

The only thing to remember is not to be in too much of a hurry to release the wine onto the market, because it takes time for the wood to harmonise with Barbera, enhancing its complexity as it evolves.

And this last point is why our Nizza docg Riserva is released only after spending at least four years in the bottle.

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