Barolo is made in eleven communes in the Langhe hills southwest of Alba, from Nebbiolo and nothing else. The hills are folded marl and sandstone laid down in a Miocene sea, and the growers divide them in two: the older, bluish Sant'Agata marl around La Morra and Barolo itself, which gives perfumed, earlier maturing wine, and the sandier Serravallian soils of Serralunga, Monforte and Castiglione, which give something harder and slower.

The wine must spend at least three years ageing, eighteen months of them in wood, before release, and even then a young Barolo is tannic and closed. What it becomes after a decade or two, pale brick in colour and scented of tar, rose, dried cherry and truffle, is the reason it is called the wine of kings. The modern style was shaped in the nineteenth century at the court of Savoy and in the cellars of Juliette Colbert at Barolo, and the single vineyard system, now written into law as 170 named menzioni geografiche, was built from the 1960s onwards.