Azienda Agricola Demarie

Roero, Piedmont, Italy
Azienda Agricola Demarie

Paolo had a glass of his own Arneis in his hand when he pulled out the photograph last summer. Susan and I were sitting with him years into a relationship with the family that started over wine and stopped being just business a long time ago. The photograph was black and white, eleven people arranged in front of the family house in Roero, taken before anyone in the frame knew what was coming. He pointed to a boy in the front row; his father.

He told the story slowly, the way people do when they've told it before but never gotten used to telling it. Who left. Who nobody knew would come back. Susan and I both watched something move across his face that I can only describe as pride sitting directly on top of grief, the two of them not canceling each other out, just occupying the same space at once. Ten years of knowing Paolo, and I had never seen that particular expression before.

It didn't stay contained to the table. He walked us through the winery afterward, past the tanks and the barrel room, out to where the property opens up behind the facility. There's a soccer goal back there. His son was in it, playing keeper, some ordinary summer afternoon game that had nothing to do with us or the tour. Paolo didn't say anything about it. He didn't have to. Susan and I understood, standing there, that everything he'd just described, the land lost, the land bought back one parcel at a time over decades, wasn't for him. He'd already told us as much without using the words. It was for the kid in the goal, and for whoever comes after him.

Producer and Estate History

The Demarie name in Roero goes back to Bartolomeo, Paolo's grandfather, who worked this land in the early decades of the twentieth century on a bet that wine, not just grapes sold off to others, was where the future sat. His son Giovanni formalized the estate as a company in 1957 and kept building on the foundation his father laid. Paolo and his brother Aldo are the third generation, running the vineyards and cellar today with Monica alongside them.

The war years broke the estate apart. When Paolo's father and uncle came home, the closest vineyard to the property, the oldest one the family had, was what remained intact. They replanted it immediately. It is still there, still producing, a physical marker of what survived. Everything else scattered over the following decades, sold off in pieces the way land does when a family is rebuilding rather than expanding.

Paolo spent the better part of his adult life buying it back, across Roero where the winery sits, and further south into the Langhe, where Barbaresco and Barolo are made. The family now farms 30 hectares across both zones, a footprint that took decades of patient, deliberate repurchasing to rebuild. Italian law does not allow him to make Barbaresco or Barolo in his Roero cellar. Barbaresco has to be vinified in Barbaresco. Barolo has to be vinified in Barolo. The reunification is real on paper, in ownership, but the winemaking itself still has to respect zones the law drew long before Paolo was reassembling what his family lost.

In 2013 the family built a new winery into that same commitment to the land, solar powered, cooled by wall and roof thickness instead of air conditioning, filtering its own water through a constructed wetland in front of the building. The estate's vineyards had already been farmed organically for over a decade before formal certification arrived in 2019. None of it reads as marketing when you've watched Paolo walk the vineyard rows explaining soil composition the way other people talk about their kids, because with Paolo, it turns out, that's exactly what he's doing.

What a Private Visit Is

A visit to Demarie means walking those replanted rows with Paolo, hearing the war story standing in the actual vineyard where it happened rather than reading it on a label, and tasting through Roero, Barbaresco, and Barolo side by side in a family's own cellar rather than a tasting room built for tour buses. This is not the appointment a hotel concierge can arrange. It is a glass of Arneis in hand while Paolo tells you what his family survived, and the rare experience of watching a family's postwar reconstruction sit finished in the glass.

From the Cellar

2023 Roero Arneis DOCG, Demarie, Arneis. This is the wine that was in my hand when Paolo showed me the photograph, and it's the wine I understood the Roero through before I understood anything else about it. Sandy, fossil-rich soil gives it a saline edge under the stone fruit that most Arneis never shows. I bought it in kegs for a restaurant program years ago and poured it all summer against Georgia heat that punishes soft whites. It never buckled. Built for shellfish, built for humidity, built to disappear a case at a time on a hot night.

2021 Barbera d'Alba Superiore, Demarie, Barbera. The wine that shows what this family does with the grape most Piedmontese actually drink at home. Barbera doesn't get the reverence Nebbiolo does, and Demarie doesn't try to force it into that role. What comes through instead is dark fruit, real acid, and a savory edge that makes it as comfortable at a Tuesday dinner as it is at a formal tasting. This is the wine that tells you Paolo hasn't lost the thread between the estate's history and the table it was always meant to serve.

2021 Roero Riserva DOCG, Demarie, Nebbiolo. The wine that makes the case for Roero as more than Barbaresco's quiet neighbor. Same grape, same family hands, the same attention in the cellar that goes into the Barbaresco a few miles south, but Roero has never carried Barbaresco's name recognition, and the wines show it. What that means for the people who actually taste both: a Nebbiolo built to drink years before its Barbaresco counterpart is ready, from a producer who isn't cutting any corners to get there. The sandy soil here gives it a lift and perfume the heavier Langhe clay doesn't produce. It drinks like a wine that knows exactly what it is and has stopped needing to prove it against its more famous neighbors.

2021 Barbaresco DOCG, Demarie, Nebbiolo. The wine at the end of the reunification story. Sourced from two carefully maintained parcels around the town of Neive, made in its own zone because the law requires it, from land Paolo spent decades buying back one piece at a time. Structured, precise, the clearest expression of what patience and stubbornness look like when they're poured into a glass. Delicate rose petals and red cherries with hints of warm spice and layers of red fruits.

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