Malabaila Brachetto Birbet 2025

The Land

The hills of the Roero are made out of an old beach. Where the Langhe rose from the seabed roughly thirty million years ago, the Roero surfaced far later, in the Pliocene, and its soils are still loose marine sand shot through with fossils: shells, leaves, whole tree trunks, the small fish of shallow water. The two zones face each other across the Tanaro and would arguably be one region except that the river abandoned its old course some 250,000 years ago and cut a new bed roughly eighty meters lower, stranding the Roero on the left bank with a completely different geology. Canale sits at the center of it. Malabaila's Brachetto grows here on sandy-marly ground between 200 and 250 meters, facing south and southwest, in a plot of well under a hectare planted in 1992.

The Wine

One hundred percent Brachetto, specifically the Birbet biotype local to the Roero, which gives the wine its name. Birbet means something close to rascal, which is fair. Fruit is picked by hand at a yield the estate holds to about five and a half tons per hectare and fermented in stainless steel at 18 to 20 degrees Celsius. Fermentation is cut short after roughly eight days, leaving sugar and a little carbon dioxide behind; legally this is not wine at all but mosto d'uva parzialmente fermentato, partially fermented grape must. It then rests a minimum of six months in steel tank before bottling. Alcohol is very low and the bubble is a soft frizzante rather than a full sparkle. In the glass it is bright red edging toward fuchsia, smelling of rose, raspberry, wild strawberry and orange blossom, with just enough natural fruit acidity to keep the sweetness from going syrupy. Production runs around 3,000 bottles a year. The 2025 season in the Roero started warm and wet and ripened early, then turned cool and rainy at the end of August; an early-picked variety like Brachetto is well placed in a year that ended that way.

The People

The Malabaila are an old Piedmontese noble family, and their grapes were vinified in the cellars of the family castle until comparatively recently. The estate in its modern commercial form dates to 1986, when Corradino dal Pozzo Carrega Malabaila began working with oenologist and agronomist Valerio Alfredo Falletti to age the wines properly rather than sell them off young. In 1990 the two built a new cellar at Cascina Pradvaj and piled an artificial hill over the top of it to hold the interior temperature steady; that building remains the headquarters. Corradino's daughter Lucrezia Carrega Malabaila now runs the estate alongside Falletti, whose own father worked here before him. Farming across roughly twenty hectares is integrated and low-impact, with grass left growing in the rows, and the estate propagates its own Arneis, Nebbiolo and Barbera clones from an old vineyard. Total production is about 100,000 bottles. Since 2020 Lucrezia, an artist, has drawn an animal for each wine on its back label.

Food Pairing

Serve it around 12 degrees Celsius, cold enough to tighten the sweetness. It was built for panettone at Christmas, where the candied peel and the wine's rose-and-raspberry register are pushing in the same direction. A bowl of fresh raspberries with cream is nearly redundant and entirely correct, the wine simply doubling the fruit in the dish. It handles torta di nocciole, the Piedmontese hazelnut cake, because low alcohol and live acidity cut ground-nut richness that a heavier dessert wine would only smother. Push it out of its lane and it does real work against heat: mapo tofu or a green curry, where residual sugar quiets capsaicin that dry wine amplifies. This is the bottle that turns an ordinary Tuesday dessert into an occasion, and it costs less than the cake.