Sometimes when you hear that someone has passed away, it strikes you as a sheer impossibility because they seemed eternal. Lorenzo Accomasso was such a person. The cult Barolo veteran died on 8 August, at the age of 91 and after more than 65 vintages under his belt.
Accomasso was considered by many an arch traditionalist, working in a small cellar in La Morra that no outsider has even set foot in. It was whispered he aged his wines in glass demijohns, a rumour that seemed to spring from the fact that Accomasso’s wines could at times display more than a whiff of volatile acidity.
In actual fact, he was forward-looking, as one of the first to practise the modern technique of bunch thinning and green harvesting in order to get the highest quality at the cost of yield. The bunches he cut off he hid in a ditch, so his very religious mother would not notice this ‘sacrilege’.
He lived a very simple, frugal life in a small house in Annunziata that he shared with his sister Elena, who was responsible for the administrative side of the business. This she seemed to run from a sideboard drawer overflowing with handwritten orders, business cards and anything she thought worth keeping. The sideboard sat crammed against the wall of the sitting room that doubled as storage for Accomasso’s few bottles.
Once when Accomasso called her to ask who his UK importer was, I watched as she rummaged through the papers for a little while and fished out a business card for Raeburn Fine Wines as if she knew exactly where she had put it.
Accomasso was known for being strong-headed and had a peculiar way of dealing with visitors. Only the very persistent would manage to obtain an appointment, depending on Accomasso’s willingness to pick up the phone, the only means of communication with him. If you were lucky enough to actually end up in his sitting room-cum-storage-cum-office, he would size you up and eventually begin to talk. If he addressed his visitors in his Piemontese dialect, it meant he didn’t like you much. I can only smugly report that on the three occasions I met Accomasso at home he addressed me in Italian.
If you wanted to buy some bottles from him, you had to have the patience of a saint. You had to be willing to listen for at least a couple of hours to him talking, before you could even ask what felt like an almost indiscreet question. Buying more than three or four bottles would be off the cards, so I never asked for more. Now I fret over every last bottle of Rocchette Barolo in my cellar.
The last time I saw Accomasso was in 2015 when I decided to just stop by unannounced. I was lucky, and he ushered me into the sitting/storage room. After a while he asked me if we could take a ride in my car to see his prized patch of Rocche dell’Annunziata, where he’d just pulled out his Rocchette vineyard.
At the time I was dumbfounded as to why he had done this. Accomasso told me that afterwards he had stomach-ache for a full week but explained simply that he would replant – which seemed an absurd idea for someone his age. Would he ever see the day the vines would be old enough to reach the same qualitative heights of his fabled Rocchette Barolo? But Accomasso had not planted this vineyard for himself, but for his nephew, who is now taking over the estate.
The first sign that a new, very young, generation has arrived is the appearance of the Accomasso website. Appointments can now be requested by email, but you would be looking in vain for a telephone number.
Photos courtesy of Accomasso.
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