Barolo&Barbaresco Wine Experience with a Local Winemaker / Torino

I have been on Piemonte wine tours before but this one is my favorite. Marco is a winemaker himself so we received a great education about the area, the grapes and the industry. We met with small scale family producers who were a delight. I recommend this tour to you if you are interested in learning about the Piemonte region.

We spent a great day with Marco. He made the experience memorable. We visited 3 family -run wineries whom all have the passion for wine-making. We learned a great deal and enjoyed the beautiful surroundings.

We had such a great experience with Marco. He was fun and informative. The wineries he chose were very good. I would highly recommend this tour

Marco, the tour guide and winemaker, was excellent! He showed us some excellent wineries/vineyards off of the beaten paththat most people don’t get to enjoy.

Marco and Giovanni made the experience personal And informative. We learned so much about wine Making from them and two other makers from the region. I would highly recommend. If you take the train to Alba the experience is even better.

It should be a little bit shorter ( less hours) Giovanni and Marco were very thorough explaining regions, grapes and the wine was great!

This is a one-of-kind experience. We have been on a number of guided wine tastings, but to have a winemaker as our host was unique. Marco is a fantastic guide with so much deep knowledge of the Piemonte viticulture and history. We visited 3 wineries: Produtorri del Barbaresco, Alberto Ballarin (La Morra, Barolo) and Cascina Galarin (Castagnole delle Lanze, Asti). Along with his brother, Marco owns, operates and makes the wine at Cascina Galarin. It’s as authentic as it gets with his son playing in the courtyard and his mother stopping by our tasting to grab a couple of glasses. Really impressed with the high quality of wines provided and really enjoyed visiting a large production in a Barbaresco and working our way to a medium sized family winery and ending with a smaller family winery (Cascina Galarin makes 40,000 bottles a year). There were 13 wines poured and all were excellent and yet varying examples of the region’s varietals with varying styles. The opportunity to be served by Alberto and witness the friendly banter of local winemakers as Alberto and Marco entertained us was an added bonus. Marco also brought us to an authentic osteria in La Morra with great food for lunch. The views from the hills of Barbaresco and La Morra are breathtaking and would be worth the trip alone. I would highly recommend this for novices and oenophiles alike.

This is a unique tour. You have the opportunity to spend a day with an active winemaker in the Langhe area. Marco is passionate about his craft and by the end of the tour you will share his passion for winemaking. If you want to go to the big name brands in the Piedmont region - book yourself a private car service and go see them. If you want to learn what it means and what it takes to work the vineyards, make the wine and market and sell the wine to local and international markets, do yourself a favor and book this experience with Marco. This was one of, if not, the best tours I have ever booked with Viator. Don’t miss it.

The first photograph with large barrels is taken at the Carema Winery, Piedmont. Beautiful Winery, great wine and nice country to visit. The only link with Barolo and Barbaresco is that they are all Piedmontese Nebbiolo. Andrea Clerin

I always was skeptical of guided tours. Being a good tour guide (same as being a good teacher) requires that you know ten times more about the subject than you have time to tell. Our tour with Marco was just such an exception. Marco is not a professional tour guide, but a professional winemaker, running the family winery Cascina Galarin, and giving wine tours as Langa Wine Tours in his spare time :-). He picked us (my wife, myself and two young Swedish couples) at the train station in Turin and drove us to the places with so familiar sounding names - Alba, Asti, Roero, Monferrato. This area of Piedmont has thousands of wineries ranging from huge commercial winemakers to very small family ones. Most of the small ones sell their grapes to the large producers, but some are dedicated to producing small volume high quality wines. Cascina Galarin is one of them, and despite relatively small volume his wines are available in the USA (I just bought a couple of bottles for Thanksgiving) and are very favorably reviewed in the Wine Enthusiast Magazine We visited three wineries: a relatively large one (as the small wineries go), a medium (Marco’s own) and a really small one, where all wine-making equipment would fit in an average basement of an average American house. But the quality of all of them was excellent. And so were the explanations of the wine-making process, variations between different grapes, different areas, different slopes, different years. There was nothing he could not answer, and it was his enthusiasm that made it exciting. It was a day well spent and was worth every penny. We would highly recommend it if you are in the area.