Ceretto

History

Family Story

Riccardo Ceretto

History can be told through the stories of wine and the families who make it. Those tales shape the landscape of time and place, just as three generations of the Ceretto family have created an indelible impression on the Langhe region and the production of its noble grape, Nebbiolo.

Born in the small village of Santo Stefano Belbo in the early 1900s, Riccardo Ceretto’s life was driven by a mix of luck and circumstance. Raised working in his family’s vineyard, butcher shop and “locanda,” or “a small restaurant and inn,” Riccardo learned to make wine for customers of the restaurant.

As he and his four siblings grew to adulthood, the family vineyard was far too small to support all of them. Mother Nature stepped in and solved this dilemma, forcing Riccardo out when a great hailstorm destroyed the entire crop and a phylloxera epidemic swept through the vineyard.

Riccardo moved to Alba, the nearest city, where he became the driver for a historical winery in the area. The winery’s owner quickly recognized Riccardo’s potential and offered him the opportunity to become winemaker and a partner in the business.

In the mid-1930s Riccardo began to make wine under the Ceretto name as well, including wines produced from grapes grown in his family’s vineyard in his hometown of Santo Stefano Belbo, which is famous for its Moscato. For the next three decades Riccardo expanded his production but, like his fellow Langhe vintners, produced wines using techniques that dated back to the 1850s, when commercial winemaking in the area first began.

The Barolo Brothers

In the 1960s, Riccardo’s sons, Bruno and Marcello, began working with their father. It was the turning point for the family business. Bruno, the more talkative and outgoing of the two, took on the business side of things, while the studious Marcello quietly improved every aspect of their winemaking. As the brothers’ experience grew, they began investing in land.

Wine production was still so limited in the region, Bruno and Marcello were able to purchase prime property, first in Barbaresco and then Barolo, gradually increasing their holdings until they were one of the largest landowners in the area. In each region they chose properties with the most promising soil composition and the most desirable sun exposure — the two most distinguishing traits between vineyard sites. And as the popularity of single-vineyard wines grew, the vineyards were soon referred to as crus, using France as a reference point.

France also served as a model for Bruno and Marcello when they purchased their first vineyard. It was 1969 and the property was Bricco Asili in Barbaresco, the first of four Ceretto winery estates. Over the next three decades, the brothers continued vineyard acquisitions, including a parcel of the Bernardot vineyard in Treiso. Today, the Bricco Asili estate is dedicated to the production of the two single-vineyard Barbaresco wines, the eponymous Bricco Asili and Bernardot.

With a return to their father’s birthplace, Bruno and Marcello established I Vignaioli Santo Stefano in 1977 with two partners, Sergio Santi and the Scavino brothers, Gianpiero and Andrea. This venture was undertaken with the goal of producing high-quality wines using the Moscato grape. Their efforts have elevated Moscato to a well-respected wine, and I Vignaioli remains the home to the Ceretto’s Moscato d’Asti.

One year later, the Cerettos invested in the Bricco Rocche vineyard in Castiglione Falletto. Again using the French model, they built a winery in the vineyard that was completed in 1982. Four single-vineyard Barolo wines are produced at Bricco Rocche, including Bricco Rocche, Prapò, Brunate and Cannubi (the last will debut in 2013).

In 1985, Blangè Langhe Arneis made its debut. It was an immediate hit and led to the family expanding their Blangè program with the acquisition of additional vineyards in the Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) zones of Roero and Langhe. Today, one out of every five bottles of Arneis produced in Piedmont bears the elegant Blangè label, proving the great success achieved by the Ceretto family producing a white wine from Piedmont.

In 1987, the Cerettos assumed the use of the Monsordo Bernardina vineyards and estate in Alba, which became the family headquarters. The property was an old farmstead dating back to the middle of the 19th century that had belonged to the first King of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II. Monsordo Bernardina is home to wines made from vineyards on the estate, as well as the wines Riccardo began producing, including Zonchera and Rossana. The family purchased the estate in 2000.

As Bruno and Marcello transformed their family’s operations by emphasizing the importance of terroir and dedicating multiple wineries to the production of cru wines, they also revolutionized the winemaking process.The Cerettos were the first producers in Piedmont to use stainless-steel tanks for fermenting red wine in the 1970s. Additionally, they adopted other modern techniques introduced at the same time, including using temperature control during fermentation, reducing maceration times and pumping wines over rather than punching them down. They also introduced new barrel aging techniques.

Bruno and Marcello also invested in the image of their wine and approached this task with an eye to package design, hiring creative designers to refashion the labels and bottles for Ceretto, including Silvio Coppola, who designed their elegant labels, from Blangè to Asij to Zonchera, and Giacomo Bersanetti and Italo Lupi, who each contributed to eye-catching bottles in the Ceretto line-up. Within a decade the Ceretto’s attention turned to visual arts outside of packaging, and they began collaborating with artists and architects on a variety of projects to enhance their estates.

The Next Generation

Bruno and Marcello not only stirred the region and the world with their passion, they also influenced their own four children, Roberta, Lisa, Alessandro and Federico, who followed their fathers’ footprints and joined the family business in 1999.

The symbolism of joining on the cusp of a new millennium is almost too rich, and yet apropos for a family that has always been at the forefront of change and innovation in Langhe. It’s impossible to predict what their individual and collective impact will be, but it is certain they will forge new territory while following the path their fathers and grandfather had paved.