The La Spinetta 2018 Barbera d'Alba Gallina is balanced and bright with dark fruit, pressed blackberry, plum and sweet potting soil. The wine is soft and richly textured, making it perfect to pair across from a classic roast pork dinner.

The 2017 Barbera d'Alba Gallina (with 7,000 bottles made) is darkly saturated and rich with an abundant display of black cherry, plum and blackberry. The wine shows broad shoulders but carries its fruit weight with considerable balance and poise. You could pair this wine with barbecued red meat or pulled pork.

Fruit for this wine comes from a two-hectare plot in the Gallina cru in Neive with south-facing exposures. The 2016 Barbera d'Alba Gallina (with 7,000 bottles produced) shows great focus and sharpness with bright cherry and blackberry fruit followed by spice, tilled earth and sweet barbecue smoke. This Barbera from Alba offers more linearity and directness compared to the other two expressions of the grape from the Asti area, where you feel the acidic crispness of the grape.

A flashy style, offering plenty of toasty, vanilla and clove aromas and flavors, yielding to blackberry and plum fruit before finishing with an element of green olive. Substantial tannins provide support. Drink now through 2021. 833 cases made, 50 cases imported.??–BS??Region: Italy / Piedmont / Barbera d'Alba Select to Add

Barbera is planted in the middle section of the celebrated Gallina cru in Neive. The rest of this vineyard is planted to Nebbiolo to make Barbaresco Gallina. Counterintuitively, La Spinetta left that strip of Barbera grapes intact because they wanted to preserve tradition. Others would have probably replaced it with the more lucrative Nebbiolo variety. The 2014 Barbera d'Alba Gallina is made from old vines evidently happy to stay exactly where they are at the moment. Despite the difficulties of the vintage, this wine oozes forth with dark intensity, a velvety structure and exuberant fruit aromas. Smokey mineral dustings also appear.