Tar and Roses

A love letter to Barolo, the wine of kings.

Barolo, they say, is like being kicked in the face by a ballerina: delicacy and prettiness set opposite acidity and tannic blackness, anise sneaking in, truffle, violet and espresso hinted at. Beyond the nebbia, the fog over the hills of Piedmont every fall, and beyond the Nebbiolo grape, the magic is in those hills, those fall clouds, those centuries of Nebbiolo grapes, and in the plant life around the vines: the cherries, berries and cypress, the Alba truffles.

In the bottle, what lies underneath has been aging since 2021: spring and summer fruits that fermented, cherries that stained the hands that crushed them, wild and amarena Italian cherries fermented Appassimento style, blackberries picked in the redwoods. Blended into that this season are raspberries and wild blackberries, co-fermented with bing cherries from Murray Family Farms to amp up the violet. It is aged on Slovenian oak and in red clay.

Pomare's Stolen Perfume is the work of its founder, raised on a farm in the Northern Maine woods, with a mother's family from Tahiti. Spring on the farm meant the smell of thawing earth and spring grasses; the long winters meant fantasies of what Tahitian warmth would smell like. Most things in a bottle captured none of it the way it had been pictured, and so the founder found natural fragrance and began making tinctures and mixing oils and resins.

Working as a wine director and sommelier reinforced a passion for terroir, and the house celebrates regional and seasonal differences in natural ingredients, believing in small production with as little intervention as possible. Formulas pivot with the season, so one vintage differs from the last. The founder studied with the alchemist Mandy Aftel, and the house was named International Sustainable Brand of 2020 for its work with upcycled redwood.