Bric Loira - Barbera d'Alba DOC

Why Bric ????

In Italian, bricco means a jug or pitcher.
But in Piedmont and in the Piedmontese dialect in particular, bricco means the top of a hill.Some philologists (those who study, among other things, the origin of words) believe it derives from the German brechen whose meaning is similar to English break.

Others are of the opinion that it comes from the Provençal brich, hill.

Still others claim that the origin of this word may be Celtic (my personal opinion is that it derives from Provençal or Occitan, whatever, which strongly influenced the Piedmontese dialect).

Given their altitude and exposure, the hilltops are the ideal areas for high-quality grapes. This is why many Piedmont wines are labelled 'bricco', which is a reminder of where they come from. However, it is interesting to note that in another era (we are talking about two generations ago) before interest in Piedmontese wines spread years after the Second World War, a bricco was an uncultivated place. A place that therefore required an enormous amount of work to make it suitable for cultivation.

In Cesare Pavese's novella 'La luna ed il falò', published in 1949, the writer refers to the bricco as a barren, desolate place. In fact, at the time, before anyone could predict that Nebbiolo and Barbera would become such popular wines

so popular, no one had ever planted vines on a bricco. But everything changed when viticulture in the region began the process of rapid evolution that took place in the early 1960s.
Today, the gentle hillsides of the Langa are one of the most spectacular landscapes in the world and a Unesco World Heritage Site.