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Da: Tamlyn Currin
Inviato: Lunedì, 12 Gennaio, 2026 11:21
A: Denise - Agricola Marrone
Oggetto: Re: new wines & ciao!
Ciao Denise
Happy new year 2026!
I have a question about your Langhe Nebbiolo (Che Vale) … when I find it on wine merchant websites, the wine doesn’t always seem to be called Che Vale, it’s just Langhe Nebbiolo – are these wine merchants selling a different wine from Che Vale? Or is it the same, but some wines don’t have Che Vale on the label?
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Da: Denise - Agricola Marrone
Inviato: Lunedì, 12 Gennaio, 2026 14:54
A: Tamlyn Currin
Oggetto: Re: new wines & ciao!
Tamlyn! Happy new year!
Allora, there’s a story to tell. “Vale” is the shortening of Valentina. She’s my sister, she’s the enologue. She started making Langhe Nebbiolo without oak ageing since vintage 2022, but she didn’t want to. Me and Serena, the other sisters, imposed her to try this new style because we’re more in contact with the market, and the trend together with the climate situation was perfect to make the experiment. And we were right, it has been a great success. Both on taste and market positioning. So next vintage, 2023, she was convinced and she decided by herself to follow the path: Che Vale in Italian is: “what a value!”. The value of being sisters and discuss every day for our ideas, if we consider they are the right ones …
So now you can understand: the Langhe Nebbiolo made this way is totally new for us, only 2 vintages (and the coming 2024), and the name Che Vale only from vintage 2023 going on … hopefully forever! 😁
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Hopefully forever indeed. Because despite having empathy for Valentina (I’m the third of four sisters and know only too well how annoying the well-meaning bossiness of know-it-all sisters can be), they were absolutely right to impose this new style on their winemaker – it is both delicious and tremendously good value.
To illustrate just how very good value this wine is, consider this: we have never, in all the 25 years of JancisRobinson.com, had a Nebbiolo from the Langhe as a wine of the week. This one will be the first. In fact, we’ve only twice featured Piemonte Nebbiolo at all, both times it was Nebbiolo from Roero, and even then, it was about 12 and 16 years ago! This is despite the fact that we love Nebbiolo, Barolo and Barbaresco so much that we have over 9,100 wine reviews for them, we’ve held five Barolo Night events, and we have over 380 articles focusing on or featuring Barolo, Barbaresco and/or Nebbiolo. It’s clear that good-value Nebbiolo, from northern Italy at least, is as rare as hens’ teeth. Well, you gotta love me, dear readers, because I just found one of them teeth.
I’ve been following Marrone since early 2019 when Denise Marrone got in touch with me, and I love (all) their wines. The family have been growing grapes and making wine for well over 150 years, but it was Pietro Marrone, in 1910, who began to take wine seriously. Four generations down the line, it’s the three Marrone sisters (calling themselves the tre fie) who are in charge. They took over the day-to-day running of the estate from their father Gian Piero Marrone in 2011. Eldest daughter Denise (far right in the photo at the top of the article) is in charge of marketing, sales and hospitality; Serena (to the left of her parents) runs sales, distribution and business; and Valentina (far left) makes the wine. Judging by the wines I’ve tasted over the last six years, the sisters bring to the estate a formidable combination of talent, brilliance, collaborative creativity and resilience. It’s clear they’re a tight-knit unit, proving the laws and lores of the triangle: it distributes force evenly, reduces stress on a single point, represents stability, symbolises direction and transformation, and (thinking of the pyramids and Maslow) symbolises ambition and progressive fulfilment.
Although the wines are not certified organic, the Marrones don’t use herbicides and use only organic fertilisers. Everything in the vineyards (around 15 ha/37 acres, most of which are in La Morra, although they have some in Alba) is done by hand. The grapes for Che Vale come from south-east-facing vineyards planted in 1995 in Madonna di Como, Alba, at about 400 m (c 1,300 ft), on mostly calcareous soil. The hand-picked grapes were destemmed and fermented in stainless-steel tanks where they spent about six months before bottling.
I first tasted this wine in its trial vintage, 2022, before it earned the name Che Vale. As you will see from my tasting notes of all three vintages, 2022 to 2024, I have loved it from the get-go. I know that with both the 2022 and 2024 my fingers hovered over 17.5, worrying whether I could justify such a high score for a ‘mere’ Langhe Nebbiolo. I should have gone with my guts and, sod it, given them the high score. This is a damn gorgeous wine. Each time I’ve tasted it, I’ve thought, ‘I’m tasting the unplugged soul of Nebbiolo!’ It sounds fanciful, until you taste it. It’s a bit like the experience of drinking glacial stream water for the first time – it’s almost shocking in its vivid purity. Of the 2022, I wrote, ‘Luminous. This may not be oaked or powerful or impressive, but it is one of the purest, most soaring expressions of Nebbiolo I’ve tasted.’ Of the 2023, ‘Nebbiolo naked, unplugged, no maquillage, no fuss, and yet the beauty and purity soar. This is not simplicity in the sense of plain, uncomplicated, for simpletons. It is simplicity in the exquisite transparency of its singularity.’ The 2024 I called the soul-child of Nebbiolo and wrote, ‘So much fruit that it’s splashing scarlet up the walls. Tannins like teeny velvet ribbons.’
I cannot emphasise how refreshing it is to taste Nebbiolo made this way. You could easily chill this a little in summer, but you wouldn’t have to, because it is so very fresh in and of itself. You could sip it as an aperitif, stick it in a picnic basket, or serve at the table with some pretty serious food – it has that kind of range. We tried it with home-made oxtail pho and it was just the right red pop of brightness alongside the silky richness of the broth and the ping-nip-slice of the chillies and lime scudding the top of the steaming noodles. It was good with biltong. It was good with our friend Howard’s pork-and-nduja wraps. I think it would be great with duck and it would also likely be good with Andalucian or Tuscan fish stews. It’s Nebbiolo so it has to be good with mushrooms (maybe pâté, scooped high on roughly assembled crostini). You could play this wine so many ways. Play with this wine!
I’m recommending all three vintages because they’re all delicious and, because it’s Nebbiolo, it is most certainly not going to fall over in a year or two. If you can get hold of it, just do it. Don’t go looking for Barolo’s orchestral movements or Barbaresco’s masterpieces. That is absolutely not what this wine is about. This is about wandering into a cathedral and you happen to hear a child from the practising choir singing pitch-perfect high treble into the vaulted high spaces. This is a wine that, in the moment, tells you how Nebbiolo dances when no one is watching.
It was the 2024 vintage which inspired me to finally write about this melt-my-heart Nebbiolo, but it’s not yet released so you’ll have to just put a reminder in your diaries for a few months’ hence. In the meantime, there is absolutely zero need to suffer in dehydrated silence. In the US, where it is imported by The Sorting Table, the 2023 and 2022 can be picked up for around $25 according to Wine-Searcher. In the UK, Vino Gusto, Evertons and The Sampler have the 2023 starting at £23.95 but you can pick up the 2022 from Nickolls & Perks (for a little less), NY Wines of Cambridge, The Butlers Wine cellar and Amps Fine Wine Merchants. It’s also available in Germany, Hong Kong and Italy.
All photos are courtesy Marrone.
Other elusive good-value Nebbiolos might be found among our Langhe wine reviews.
