Bruno Giacosa
Appellations
History
The Giacosa family's wine business in Neive dates to 1900, when Carlo Giacosa founded it as a commerciante, or grape broker, buying fruit from growers across the Langhe rather than farming his own vines. His son Mario continued the trade, and Mario's son Bruno Giacosa (born 1929) joined the family business at age 15 after leaving school during the Second World War, becoming the firm's third generation. From the 1960s, Bruno Giacosa was ranked alongside Gaja and the Produttori del Barbaresco cooperative as one of the producers who demonstrated the full potential of Barbaresco, and he became known in the trade as the 'genius of Neive.' In the 1970s his varietal bottlings of Roero Arneis, alongside those of Vietti, helped rescue the nearly extinct white grape from obscurity.
For decades Giacosa made wine entirely from purchased grapes, sourced from an established network of growers he trusted to farm for quality; the best-known example is Barbaresco Santo Stefano, bottled from the 1964 vintage onward from fruit grown by Italo Stupino at Castello di Neive. Starting in 1980, Giacosa began acquiring vineyard parcels of his own in Serralunga d'Alba (including the Falletto cru, which gave its name to the estate), La Morra and the Barbaresco zone (Asili, Rabaja), bottled under the Azienda Agricola Falletto label. The firm has since drawn a formal line between these two ranges: wines from owned vineyards carry the Azienda Agricola Falletto name, while wines from bought or leased-vineyard fruit are labeled Casa Vinicola Bruno Giacosa. As the estate moved toward an estate-only strategy for its top wines, some purchased-fruit bottlings, including Santo Stefano, were discontinued after the 2012 vintage.
Only in vintages Giacosa judged exceptional did he release a Riserva, identified by a distinctive red label on the Barbaresco Asili and Barolo Falletto (Le Rocche del Falletto) bottlings; in the trade the appearance or absence of a red-label Riserva in a given year has served as an informal barometer of vintage quality in Barolo and Barbaresco. The wines are aged in large traditional botti made of French rather than the historically Slavonian oak, a style described as 'updated traditional.' Bruno Giacosa suffered a stroke in January 2006 and made a full recovery, but gradually ceded an increasing share of leadership to his daughter Bruna Giacosa, who has run the firm since his death in January 2018 at age 88, continuing to work with longtime winemaker Dante Scaglione.