Barolo and its Legislation Now that we have demarcated the Barolo zone, we can start to unravel its legal identity. Although it may be true that a wine should be judged on its gustatory merits alone, a brief glance at the regulations which have been adopted is also of use, not to limit its freedom, but to protect its salient characteristics and protect its identity. As previously mentioned, Barolo remained unprotected by specific legislation until the DOC of 1966 and, for this very reason, was all too often subject to counterfeiting. As early as 1873, a certain Ghisolfi protested during an assembly of the Barolo communal administration that false Barolo was to be found on the market: "…which causes not insignificant damage to the most prestigious of our wines, both at home and abroad". In 1899 Senator Calissano of Alba, quoting the examples of Barolo and Barbaresco, denounced to the Italian Parliament the complete lack of legislation to protect typical wines. The previously mentioned 'Decree on Typical Wines' delineated geographical limits but did not protect them from fraud nor were swindlers fined. In fact, fraudulent Barolo continued to be released onto the market right up until the '60s and '70s, when the Consortium calculated that only half of the Barolo for sale had actually been produced in the Barolo zone! The advent of the DOC, 'Denominazione d'Origine Controllata', regulations in 1966 led to the first efficient controls, each producer being obliged, at the end of harvest, to declare his yield in order to obtain the so-called 'DOC stamps' - that is, communal certification attesting to the exact yield of a typical wine. These certificates are then presented to the Chamber of Commerce where the land registry of DOC vineyards (the 'Albo Vigneti' of 1967) is kept and where cross-over checks of declared yield to number of vineyards per producer can be performed. This problem was definitively solved, however, in 1980, when the DOCG, 'Denominazione d'Origine Controllata e Garantita', a singularly efficient and rigorous system, was introduced. In addition to the DOC regulations, under the DOCG system each lot of wine is controlled before bottling via chemical analysis of sealed samples to ensure that regulatory requisites are being met. Another sample is subjected to anonymous tasting by a commission of six experts. Two commissions take it in turns to perform this examination, each composed of a president plus five other members chosen from a group of sommeliers.
