Five years ago I was eating roast pigeon (as you do) with friends when someone pulled out a bottle of nebbiolo. The food and wine had all been warmly and collectively well received until this point; suddenly the table was divided. The wine looked pale for a red wine, with rusty-coloured edges, but when you took a sip – it was tannic and acidic and yet full of strong, tarry flavour. It seemed like a contradiction in a glass. Like it was speaking in a different tongue.

It didn’t look much – but I couldn’t stop wanting to taste it. It had spunk; even if it didn’t look like one. Not everyone at the table agreed – one thought it tasted like ‘sump oil’.

‘We really have to set the scene for people at cellar door,’ Fred Pizzini told writer Max Allen for a Gourmet Traveller article a few years back. ‘We tell them to forget about cabernet and shiraz, to not expect deep purple colour, to not expect heaps of fruit (flavour). So when they taste the wine, they’re prepared – and they’re usually bowled over by how much personality it has.’

I wish Fred had been at our dinner table. Nebbiolo – and its Piedmont regional stablemate, barbera – are grape varieties that make for different red wines. Or different to cabernet and shiraz and merlot, anyway. Appreciating them can take some ritual, some explanation, some time to get your head around – they’re slow wines, made to be consumed with slow food perhaps – though once the light goes off in your head,  watch out! Nebbiolo is known as the king of Italian red wine grapes and can be highly addictive.

Which is why it’s sometimes called Italy’s equivalent of red Burgundy (French pinot noir). It sings the same Siren song.

Perfume, personality, strength, longevity (good nebbiolo wines can be cellared for decades, and usually need to be decanted) – this is the kingdom of nebbiolo. It’s a grape that is notorious for being hard to grow, hard to make, and hard to understand at first – king is the polite word, when dictator is probably more apt. To steal another Fred Pizzini line from that Max Allen article: “It’s not so much a challenging grape variety. You just need to spend a decade or two working on it.”

Barbera has a lot in common with nebbiolo. Its personality isn’t as fierce and nor are its tannins – and it’s ‘fruitier’ in flavour and redder in colour too – but it’s full of refreshing acidity and for a light-ish red it has a stack of savoury, spicy, mouth-puckering character. It’s makes for a great drink, full stop, but it’s also a great drink on both the road to nebbiolo – and the road to the pizza shop.

Both nebbiolo and barbera are well suited to the King Valley – as releases to date have amply shown. Pizzini leads the way with nebbiolo in the Valley; Chrismont, Dal Zotto and Sam Miranda with barbera.