Juliette Colbert is an important character in Piemontese history. Beautiful, cultured and refined, she arrived in Italy from Paris in 1814 and she settled almost immediately in the splendid Palazzo Barolo in Torino. A few years later, with the complicity of her husband Carlo Tancredi Falletti di Barolo, she discovered her vocation for charity and pious works, and transformed Palazzo Barolo into a refuge for the poor and destitute.
Colbert's greatness was not limited to charity works, she also had the intuition of improving nebbiolo, a wine which was cultivated in her estates located near Barolo Castle. At that time, according to some documents, nebbiolo was a sweet and sparkling wine, but it was badly aged and stored in an even worse way.
Juliette, who knew French wines very well, entrusted the new wine making process to enologist Paolo Francesco Staglienò who changed forever the production method, transforming it in a dry and aromatic wine, vinified according to modern French techniques.
The new wine, which in 1843 took the name of "Barolo", became so good and surprising that the Count of Cavour himself converted his cellars to the new production. It is said that when King Carlo Alberto asked the Marchioness to let him taste «that famous wine of hers he had heard so much about», Colbert did not send him a case of six, but 325 casks of 500 liters each, one for every day of the year, excluded, of course, the forty of Lent.
