Cantina Del Pino

At the top of the Ovello hill, where a towering Mediterranean pine has stood watch since 1886, sits one of Barbaresco’s most storied and understated estates. The tree was planted by Domizio Cavazza — the “father of Barbaresco” and founding director of Alba’s Royal Enological School — to celebrate the birth of his son. When Cavazza’s estate later passed to the Vacca family in the 1920s, they renamed the property in the pine tree’s honor: Cantina del Pino.

For generations, the Vacca family farmed these hallowed slopes and sold their grapes to Produttori del Barbaresco, the celebrated local cooperative their family helped found back in a church basement in 1958. But in 1997, Renato Vacca — a graduate of Alba’s enology school who had spent five years learning the cooperative’s cellars from the inside — convinced his father Adriano it was time to bottle their own wine. What followed was two decades of quietly extraordinary winemaking from one of Barbaresco’s most historically significant vineyard sites: the very Ovello parcel where Cavazza made the first wine ever labeled “Barbaresco,” in 1894.

Renato guided his wines with patience rather than force — traditional in spirit, yet unafraid of his own instincts, from a touch of whole-cluster fermentation to aging in both large oak casks and neutral barriques. The result: Barbarescos that are humble and reserved in youth, only to reveal remarkable depth, elegance, and structure with time in the bottle. Cru bottlings from Ovello, Albesani, and occasionally Gallina sit alongside a blended Barbaresco, each a precise expression of its particular corner of hillside.

Since Renato’s passing in 2020, his wife Franca Miretti has carried the winery forward with the same reverence for place and the same gentle hand in the cellar, ensuring that Cantina del Pino’s quiet greatness continues for the next generation.