The fog comes down over the Langhe in October, thick and low, and settles between the vine rows like something with an opinion. The locals call it nebbia, and it is the fog that Nebbiolo is said to be named after. This is the season these hills were built for: white truffles shaved over everything, lunches that outlast the daylight, and a red wine with the structure to stand up to all of it. The wine is Barolo, and it has spent far too long being treated as something you are not quite allowed to drink yet.

Barolo arrives with baggage. The king of wines, they call it, which is the sort of title that makes a bottle sound less like dinner and more like an exam. It has a reputation for being tannic, austere and impossibly slow, a wine you buy in your forties and open in your sixties. Some of that is true. Most of it is a decade out of date. The useful questions are the simple ones. What is Barolo, how do you drink it without waiting half your life, and where should you start. Here is the plain version, with a few bottles worth opening while the fog is still down.

The grape that tastes of fog

Barolo is made from a single grape, Nebbiolo, grown across a run of hillside villages south of Alba in Piedmont, in the north-west corner of Italy. Nebbiolo is a pale, difficult, late-ripening thing that buds early and harvests late, hanging on into the misty end of October when every other grape is safely in. It gives almost no colour, which fools people. Barolo is often no darker than a ruby, and then it ambushes you with a wall of tannin and perfume that has no business coming out of something so light. Think tar and roses, dried cherry, woodsmoke and orange peel.

Place does the rest. The best Barolo comes from eleven communes around the town itself, with names collectors recite like a rosary: La Morra, Barolo, Castiglione Falletto, Serralunga d'Alba, Monforte. Two soils run through the zone and split the style neatly in two. The western villages, on younger, softer marl, make Barolo that is perfumed and comparatively approachable. The eastern villages, Serralunga above all, sit on older, harder ground and make the brooding, structured wines that take longest to come round. Same grape, same appellation, two temperaments, decided by a few million years of geology.

Barolo and Barbaresco, the two Nebbiolos

A few miles the other side of Alba, the same grape makes a wine with a gentler reputation: Barbaresco. The soils are a little richer, the climate marginally warmer, the ageing rules a shade less demanding, and the result is Nebbiolo with its edges rounded off a touch sooner. Barbaresco is often sold as the easier sibling, the one you drink while the Barolo sleeps, and there is truth in that. Do not mistake easier for lesser. The Barbaresco from Punset, from the superb 2016 vintage, has the fragrance and length of anything grown next door, with most of a decade of bottle age already doing the patient work for you.

The names to know straddle both villages. Bruno Giacosa, whose Barolo from Falletto and Barbaresco from Rabaja rank among the most revered wines Piedmont has ever produced, worked both sides of Alba with the same uncompromising hand. His classic Barolo is the gentlest way into that pantheon. Once you grasp that a single great grower can speak both dialects, you stop thinking of Barolo and Barbaresco as rivals and start treating them as a pair.

How to drink it without the wait

Here is the part nobody mentions at the smart end of the shop. You do not have to wait. The old counsel to cellar Barolo for twenty years was written for a different era of winemaking, when the tannins were savage and the vintages unreliable. Today's growers handle their fruit and their oak far more deftly, and a recent run of warm, generous vintages has produced Barolo that is a pleasure to drink young. The whole trick is choosing the right bottle and giving it the right treatment.

There are two easy ways in. The first is a well-made classic Barolo from an approachable recent vintage. The 2021 from Prunotto gathers Nebbiolo from across the zone into a wine that is fragrant, balanced and open for business now, for a little under fifty pounds. The second is to let someone else do the waiting and buy a bottle that already has age on the clock. Mirafiore's Paiagallo 2016, a single cru from the commune of Barolo in a fine vintage, is drinking beautifully today with no homework required. Either way, decant it. An hour in a jug turns a tight young Barolo into the wine it wants to be, and it costs you nothing but a little forethought.

Between those two bottles sits most of what makes Piedmont worth the trouble. One is a classical Barolo you can open tonight; the other a mature Barbaresco with the suppleness only time gives. Drink them a week apart and you will learn more about Nebbiolo than any tasting note could tell you.

Where the money goes

Climb the range and the prices climb with it, for reasons that are mostly honest. The finest crus are tiny, demand is global, and the best growers make heartbreakingly little. The single-vineyard Giacosa bottlings belong firmly in the once-a-year category, and Roagna's La Pira, old-vine Nebbiolo farmed with near-religious patience in Castiglione Falletto, is the sort of wine collectors discuss in lowered voices. None of these are everyday purchases, and nor should they be. It is worth knowing the summit is there, though, if only to see how far the view can go.

At the table

Nebbiolo was bred for the Piedmontese table, which in autumn means richness and earth: braised beef cheek, hare pappardelle, a slow brasato al Barolo cooked in the wine itself, and above all the white truffle of Alba, whose season runs from October into the new year and whose scent might as well have been designed to meet this grape. Serve the wine cooler than a warm room, around sixteen to eighteen degrees, in the largest glasses you own. And when the Nebbiolo needs an evening off, remember that Piedmont makes whites too. Punset's Langhe Arneis is the local answer, floral and brisk, lovely with the antipasti before the reds take over.

If Piedmont has you in its grip, the natural next stop is Tuscany. Our guide to Brunello di Montalcino covers the other great Italian red built to age, while the rule-breaking Super Tuscans show the country at its most rebellious. For the full lie of the land, from the Langhe to Etna, start with our best Italian red wine guide.

Barolo is not an exam, whatever its reputation implies. It is one difficult, glorious grape, grown on a handful of foggy hills, made by people who have spent generations learning to tame it. Choose a bottle with a little age or a generous vintage, give it a decanter and a proper dinner, and it will show you exactly what the fuss has always been about. The fog will be down over the Langhe for months yet. There is no better time to pour a glass and let it clear.