Ever since they began making wine together, the Conterno brothers couldn't agree with each other. After almost a decade of wrangling over how to make their wines, they split. This bottle was the product of those years of conflict but the bitterness of the brothers did not extend to the wine. The Wine Spectator takes up the story from here..." The conflict manifested itself in their visions for Barolo. Made from Nebbiolo, a grape with abundant tannins, Barolo is a wine that can age, sometimes for decades. Most winemakers of the time believed it was necessary to extract as much tannin as possible to lengthen the life of the wine. The juice and alcohol sat on the skins in big oak fermenting vats for more than a month, leaching tannins out of the skins and seeds. 'We used to keep it on the skins for 40 or 50 days,' says Conterno. 'When we would taste it afterward, you couldn't drink it. You had to spit it, it was so tannic.' The wine was then aged for years in big Slavonian oak casks called botti before being transferred to bottles to age more. 'In order to hold the wine for a long time, we would bury demijohns in sand in the cellar for 10 to 15 years.' In perfect vintages, the wines would age into powerful, refined beauties." (10/2010)