(Decanter) - Jane Anson reports on a fresh discovery of a Barolo monopole vineyard that has been certified by the local Consorzio... 

It’s a bit like buying a house and discovering a Titian hidden in the floorboards. When Silvano Boroli decided to break from his family’s De Agostini publishing company back in 1997, he bought the small Cascina Bompe estate in Alba, near to the Barolo heartlands.

He turned the farmhouse that came along with the 12 hectares of vines into a hotel and restaurant, Locanda del Pilone, that now has its first Michelin star. It also lists 95% of all Barolo producers, ‘because it made sense to make it a place that all the best names would want to come, where they could drink their own wines with clients’.

Just six months after his arrival, Boroli, a former senator as well as newspaper owner, managed to acquire an old farm in Castiglione Falletto, an area that is notoriously difficult for outsiders to get a piece of.

With a foothold in both Barolo and Alba, the Boroli family might have been forgiven for feeling pretty content. But in 2007, when son Achille Boroli had taken over running the property, American journalist and writer Alan Tardi brought up something that he had discovered during research for his book Romancing the Vine.

‘I’m pretty sure that you have a monopole vineyard within your land,’ Tardi said over dinner one night.

Achille shook his head. ‘We have the official maps from the Consorzio di tutela Barolo. There is no single MGA (Menzioni Geografiche Aggiuntive, the equivalent of a named climat in Burgundy) entirely within the boundaries of our farm.’

Barolo monopole – the proof

Tardi assured him that he had found one from an old map, and suggested that he go back into the local archives and libraries to find proof.

Maps, funnily enough, were part of Achille’s heritage. De Agostini publishing company was founded in 1904 by a geographer, and was known for its maps and encyclopedias even before being bought by Archille’s great grandfather in 1919. But none of them had ever meant as much to him as the one that he discovered two years after the conversation with Tardi; a map from the 1960s demonstrating that one of the oldest named vineyards in the commune of Castiglione Falletto was located entirely within their Cascina La Brunella farm.

Armed with this proof, the Consorzio agreed to add a new MGA to the Barolo vineyard map in their next revision, due in 2012.

‘I wasn’t sure until I saw it in black and white,’ Achille says today. ‘But there it was, MGA Brunella Monopole. In theory we could have bottled from the 2012 vintage, but we didn’t want to jump the gun until we had actually seen the new map with our own eyes. So the first bottles will be from the 2013 vintage, on the market in 2017 after five years of ageing.’

The monopole – a Cru de 3° livello – is 5.01 hectares in total, with 63% Nebbiolo, 10% Dolcetto and the rest Langhe rosso.

The Boroli family already makes wine from two other MGAs, Cerequio and Villero, but they are shared with other growers. The fact that Brunella is a monopole gives it a particular cachet, as there are so few in Barolo.