# Bricco dell'Uccellone: The Barbera Named for a Big Nose

_How a neighbour's nickname became one of Piemonte's most important wines_

> Il Vino Bello, 2026-09-19. Il Vino Bello editorial (https://ilvinobello.com/editorial/bricco-delluccellone-big-nose-story).

Every serious Barbera drinker knows the name Bricco dell'Uccellone. Fewer know that "Uccellone," literally "the big bird," was not chosen for its poetry. It belonged to a real woman.

As the story is told in Rocchetta Tanaro, an elderly neighbour lived on the hillside above the vineyard that would eventually lend the wine its name. She always dressed in black, and she had a long, sharply hooked nose that the villagers thought resembled a bird's beak. Between the black clothing and the profile, the nickname stuck: l'uccellone, the big bird. When Giacomo Bologna went looking for a name for his new wine, he did not reach for something elegant or invented. He reached for the hill itself, and the hill already had a name, hers.

**The wine earned its own kind of fame in 1982.** At the time, Barbera was Piemonte's everyday red: high acid, low prestige, rarely aged in anything more ambitious than large old casks. Giacomo Bologna macerated the grapes on the skins for twenty days, then did something almost nobody had done with Barbera before: he moved it into small French barriques for twelve months, followed by another twelve in the bottle before release. Barrique ageing was, at the time, a Bordeaux and Burgundy habit. Applying it to a grape most people considered a lunch wine was, depending who you asked, either heresy or genius. It turned out to be both, and it worked. Bricco dell'Uccellone became the wine most credited with proving Barbera could age, structure itself, and command real attention, launching what is now sometimes called Piemonte's "Barbera revolution," with Braida's Bricco della Bigotta and Ai Suma following in the years after as siblings from neighbouring vineyards.

**In the glass**, four decades on, the wine has lost none of its ambition. Deep ruby with garnet at the rim, it opens on red berries and forest fruit before spice, mint, vanilla and liquorice from the oak take over. The palate is dense and full-bodied, with the tannic backbone and vanilla-laced oak that made it famous, and enough structure to reward several years in a cellar. It remains, tannin for tannin, one of the more convincing arguments that Barbera belongs in the same conversation as Barolo, poured a touch warm, around 17 to 18°C, alongside roasts, game, or a well-aged cheese.

Bricco dell'Uccellone is still made today by Giacomo Bologna's children, Raffaella and Giuseppe, from the same Rocchetta Tanaro hillside their grandfather worked. The woman it is named for is long gone. Her nickname is not.