A Path to Wine: An Interview with Gaia Gaja

Introducing A Path to Wine, an interview series published in conjunction with JancisRobinson.com. Featuring some of the best-known women in wine, we discuss the impact of their lives and careers as they inherit the legacy of world-renowned wine estates.

For the second instalment in our Path to Wine series we interview Gaia Gaja, who is part of the fifth generation to own and manage the renowned Gaja Winery in Barbaresco, which was founded in 1859 and achieved worldwide recognition under the leadership of her father, Angelo.

She is the second generation to run Gaja Family Wine Estates, alongside her sister Rossana and her brother Giovanni, with properties now in Montalcino, Bolgheri, and Etna, as well as Barbaresco. Gaia joined the family business in 2004 and since then has travelled extensively around the world as Gaja’s International Brand Ambassador. Today she is sometimes known as the “Queen of Barbaresco”, a fitting title, and is undoubtedly one of the most influential women in the wine industry.

I’m really excited to have the chance to talk to Gaia about your journey in wine today. Thank you so much for joining us, Gaia. Would you mind sharing a little bit about your upbringing in Piedmont and perhaps your earliest memories of both vines and wines as a child?

I grew up in Barbaresco, which is the place I live now and where all my siblings and my parents also live. Barbaresco is a tiny village of 600 people, surrounded by hills of vineyards. It’s a village where every family, in one way or another, is involved with the production of wine. Some people sell grapes, some are part of the cooperative, some are winemakers. It’s a special environment. I loved growing up in Barbaresco because I knew everyone, so I felt a sense of protection. At the same time, I felt a great sense of freedom because when I was a kid, I was out all day long in the vineyards, in the fields playing with my cousins. Everybody knew us so there was nothing to be concerned about.

My earliest memory about wine and vineyards is from elementary school. There was a day each year where our teachers asked all the kids to bring in a bag full of grapes. In the morning I would arrive with my bag of grapes, and we used our hands to squeeze them. And in the coming days we would observe the fermentation – it was like our science class. I remember walking in the winery holding my grandfather’s hand and how proud I was. He was always taking me everywhere, so I always had a great connection with my family and great love for them. I think that’s why I wanted to work with them and bring forward their project. That’s the beauty of a family business, you get to bring forward the dream of the generation before. Then I discovered that it was my dream too and my passion.

To go all the way back to the 1850s, can you tell us a bit about how your family first started selling wine? Is it correct that you had a tavern?

Yes, I’ve discovered that many wineries started like that. Barbaresco was a very busy village because it’s near the River Tanaro. The people on one side of the river could come to Barbaresco via a port and could cross into Barbaresco on the other side. Our tavern was very busy. It was called the Steam Tavern and it was a place that started to become famous because of the wine that was served there. It was the wine that my great, great grandfather was producing below the tavern in the original first room of our cellar. In 1859 my great, great grandfather decided to start focusing on selling the wine. He was mainly selling the wines in big jars, but we do have bottles and labels from the first generation.

Then one of his seven sons, Angelo, started to run the business. Angelo married an amazing woman who died in 1961 so I never met her. But I’ve heard so much from my grandfather and father about her. Her name was Clotilde Rey and she was very charismatic and very severe. My father remembers that when she looked you in the eyes, you felt like someone was passing through you. Clotilde was very frugal and careful in spending. The savings were only allowed to be spent on the business, for buying a better vineyard for example. According to my grandfather and father, she’s the one who passed a different ambition into the family. She also raised my grandfather and my father and transferred her ambition and her character onto them. Her ambition was not flashy and exhibitionist but very concrete and she had great determination.

Then my grandfather started in the very early 1930s and developed and managed the winery up until 1961. He was the producer of Barbaresco and the Mayor of Barbaresco and was so proud of the village, trying in every way to put it on the map. In 1964, when he was mayor, he brought running water to the village. It’s incredible that up to 1964, it was easier to drink wine than to drink water because water had to come from the well. It seems another era. My grandfather understood that it was important to own and buy the sites that he thought were the best. In those years a lot of land was available and there was not much interest in Barbaresco. It was a time of immigration, more than attention to the area. In those years, people, especially the clergy and noble people were selling land. My grandfather bought some of the best vineyards we still have today. He knew the area by heart.

My father then started in 1961 and began to run the winery. He has a very different personality from my grandfather, but they had the same goal: to make Barbaresco shine, even though they had different methods. My father was lucky because thanks to my grandfather, he already owned some beautiful land, and had the name and reputation my grandfather had built. My father started to work on revolutionising the way of managing the vineyard and making the wine. He still is a visionary. He’s someone who’s always positive and looks forwards to the future and isn’t nostalgic. I am perhaps sometimes nostalgic, but there is no space for nostalgia in him. He’s always believing in the potential and that the best is yet to come. In 1977, my father married my mother Lucia who also comes from Barbaresco. My mum comes from another winemaking family and her father had some vineyards and was producing a Barbaresco as well. When my mum was 16 years’ old, she started to work at the winery of my grandfather as their first secretary. Then after a few years she and my father got married. She’s really amazing, I consider her the engine of our car. She keeps everything together behind the scenes. My mum learnt everything by doing because she started to work so young and has always been taking care of the financial aspect, the administration, the logistics and the IT. My sister, my brother and I are only partly taking over but she’s still as involved as my father is. I joined in 2004, as you said. My sister joined in 2009 and my brother in 2017. So, we are a complete family working together since Giovanni joined in 2017.

If we can rewind a little, you studied economics at university. Tell us about this decision.

I always wanted to be a part of the family business and I loved living in Barbaresco up until I was 13 or 14 and then I started to hate the village. From 16 to 18 I really didn’t like it because I felt that I was trapped. I couldn’t drive a motorcycle or car and there were very few kids of my age. And there was just wine, wine, wine and not a theatre or cinema, no gym, no museum. No nothing. In that moment it was a soft moment of rebellion. I feared that if I was going to study viticulture I was going to be trapped or down in the cellar. So, I decided to study something very generic, like economics, so that I could still help my family. If I could go back, I would’ve probably studied archaeology, psychology, philosophy, but not winemaking or viticulture. Anything that isn’t precisely related with my work. I think there is a lot of learning to be done simply by doing and by sharing with the team.

You officially joined the Gaja winery in 2004. I understand that you got an offer of a position from your father when you were in San Francisco? Were you expecting that offer?

I had lived in San Francisco for 9 months and I had so many friends and so many opportunities to go out and do different things. I was amazed by the city and thought I could potentially make my living out there and perhaps I could help my family from afar, maybe open a Gaja office in San Francisco. I was afraid of going back home. Then there was a special wine that brought me back. I was out with friends, and we all loved wine. Everybody would bring a different great bottle of wine. Sometimes they brought my wines as well and when they did, they would give me the bottle and say you open it, you check it, how is it? I remember being in a loud restaurant and we were all chatting, laughing, and drinking great wines without really paying attention to what we were drinking unfortunately. I opened a magnum and took out the cork without even checking what it was. I just poured it into a glass and raised the glass and it was like it gave me a punch in the face. It woke me up. It was a wine for me that was so important. It was our Barbaresco 89 and it made me nostalgic for a moment. Its smell reminded me of Linden trees (that we have in Barbaresco) and it smelled like the stairs going down to the cellar and of certain rooms of the cellar. It really surprised me that a wine was so much like home. It was loudly screaming home. I decided it would have been a mistake not to listen to that call and that the roots were probably deeper than what I thought. And so, I decided to go back. My father called me and offered me a position as Vice President, which is a joke because there aren’t really any titles in the winery. My mum said he’s only making you Vice President so that everybody knows that he’s the President. It’s a joke of a title in my family.

My family has always been behind everything. I think that’s what an artisan does; it means that you’re behind the project and idea and the making of it. All the details that are present at the end, the style, the taste, are all informed by the family’s joint decisions. We are all involved in the decisions about the vineyards, the winemaking, the packaging, the communication. We have our way of working which so far works amazingly well. That may change in the future. When I follow a project, at every step I always update everyone. When everyone is truly updated then we can make a decision together.

We are all passionate about what we do so I have total trust in all of us because we work together, and we update each other on every aspect. Maybe I’m not the expert of every detail, but together we know what we’re talking about, and we can decide. It’s very organic.

Your father has been credited with fundamentally changing the world of Italian fine wine. He’s a dynamic innovator and some would say a visionary, having achieved many “firsts” in Italy. How did you feel about starting to work with him?

I discovered and learnt who my father is when we started to work together. Growing up, my father was always very busy and for a time he was travelling a lot so he wasn’t often at home. My father has one topic and that’s wine – the world of wine. When I started to work, I started to be part of that topic as well. We started to share ideas little by little, so I got to know him better. I am amazed by how his thoughts are very clear and simple, with very precise direction and I admire his vision. He’s able to picture a place 20 to 30 years from now. Sometimes he says things that seem absurd. Most of the time when he proposes an idea our reaction is “what are you talking about?”, “are you crazy?” Then after 5 or 10 years, that idea doesn’t seem so absurd anymore. He has a strong personality and is used to leading and imposing some guidelines on decisions and although we didn’t really believe in them much at the beginning, we embrace them and then little by little they start to become clear to us as well.

Were there any challenges to overcome as you found your feet in the business in the early days? Or was there a part of the transition to working for the family business you feel was particularly successful?

I think that my father has been very generous in giving me responsibility in a very short space of time. He gave me the stage of being the winery’s ambassador and to be the one talking for the family. In a couple of years, he gave me a lot of freedom in deciding who our partners should be in other countries. He gave me full responsibility in the commercial and PR side very quickly which was great. I think he understood that I loved the tasting part and so I started to think about the wines that we make, and I was constantly tasting around the world in different vintages, in different situations. I also started to give my opinion on what I would have loved to find in the wines, and we started to talk more about the stylistic aspect, and little by little he gave me more trust there as well.

When I arrived, I was moved by this great ambition of transitioning the winery into being biodynamic and my father disagreed and said we didn’t need to go biodynamic. I didn’t understand why because it was the peak of winegrowing to me at the time. He always has said to us, “do things in your own different ways.” The idea of following a precise protocol which isn’t the right fit for him, felt uncomfortable. I understood that in telling him, “let’s do biodynamic viticulture”, it was too much. But it was his idea to start working with a botanist and then an entomologist, a phytopathologist, an expert of bees. We started to build our team of external collaborators that gave not just the family, but also the team, lots of ideas on how to work the vineyards in order to preserve the fertility of the soil and keep it alive. With a lot of experimentation, everybody got very involved, and, in the end, it turned into a great learning experience. We now have a way of working, I’m not sure how you define sustainable, but it is our dynamic. And so, in time, over the 10 years, I understood the importance of developing our own dynamic.

Can you talk to us in brief about each of your family’s properties in Barbaresco, Montalcino, Bolgheri, and Mount Etna? How does your approach to managing them differ?

The vineyard is an ecosystem, and the vine is also a micro ecosystem comprising the plant, and all the yeast, fungi, and bacteria that live on and in it. What is most important is to do as little treatment as possible. Not to over protect the plants, and only to do it when it’s needed. We work in different ways in different areas. Already between Barbaresco and Barolo, I can see a lot of differences. In Barbaresco, for example, we have soils that are a little more sandy and more compact. We’ve been working to boost the different types of grass growing on the soil and to fill it with a nice and complex cover crop. This can be a bit challenging in Barbaresco because the soil tends to get drier than in Barolo where there’s more potential of holding water. So that’s different.

One thing that we don’t unfortunately have any longer in Barolo and Barbaresco are the woods. Little by little every hill has been covered by vineyard. But our experiences in Toscana made us more aware of the importance of diversity both in and around the vineyards. Today in Piedmont we plant in a different way. We just planted a new vineyard on the slope of a hill in Alta Langa, twenty minutes away from Barbaresco. It’s at an altitude of 700 metres and therefore we approached it with a very different mindset. Imagine the hill is wavy – it has a lot of ditches created by the water. So usually when you have a slope the first thing that you do is level the slope so that you can use all of it. In this case we kept those ditches and enlarged them so that the water would continue to run down the slope. We “wasted” 25% of the hill but planted 800 trees and bushes on 6 hectares. The idea of bringing all of this biodiversity together is to produce a better ecosystem in which different insects and wildlife can live, making a more balanced environment.

Down in Montalcino it’s the opposite. There is no other region like Montalcino in Europe – it’s 80% woodland and 20% vineyards. The opposite of Piedmont. The vineyards are responding to this richness of biodiversity in Montalcino. For the future we decided to move higher in altitude and just bought a piece of land that is on the highest side of the entire denomination at 620 metres elevation. We don’t know what we’ll get from there yet as we just planted. But the windiness, the coolness, is like mountain weather. I think the rocky soil will give us a very different Sangiovese to what we already have. I would love to make a single vineyard from there just to show the diverse character of Sangiovese. I also think with the challenges of the weather and the fact that you have to work with only one variety making a single vineyard is going to be a bit more of a struggle.

In Barbaresco and Barolo, Nebbiolo has always been planted following what are our cru. So Nebbiolo has always been planted on the hill of Rabajà or Asili, Cannubi or Cerequio, and so on. Montalcino is different. Sangiovese has historically always been planted near an abbey, or convent, or church or near a castle or a tower. So Montalcino doesn’t really have that concept of single vineyard that we have in Piedmont. There are a lot of abbeys and churches in Montalcino. Our church is very humble but it’s the oldest church.

Then there is Bolgheri which is a place that I adore. I would not mind living in Bolgheri because the sun is always shining, there is always a nice, cool breeze and you see the sea and smell the beautiful woods. It’s a very comforting place. When I go there, I feel relaxed and optimistic. I have a different approach to my day of work, and I think that the beauty and the brightness that surrounds me also brings brightness to my thoughts. And I think the wines are like that. The wines of Bolgheri have this sweet fruit expression and there is a bit of saltiness from the sea. There is the perfume of the Mediterranean woods. The goal is to make wines that reflect the origin. For me, if I feel these elements of nature in the wine, then the wine brings me to Bolgheri.

The last project is a partnership with Alberto Graci, a producer from Etna. And that’s a bit of a mystery. If you plant vineyards in Montalcino, you assume you know what’s going to happen. The same goes for Bolgheri as well. But if you go on the south slope of Etna and produce Carricante then it has some mystery because the south slope of Etna is not that developed. Carricante is produced in small quantities on the east side of the volcano, not on the south. We are going through a real exploration here which is interesting for Alberto because he is on the north slope so doesn’t know much about the south. It is interesting for us because it’s a completely different territory. Here we have clay and limestone. We have a marine origin in all the areas that we are, but marine is not the origin of Etna. What is there is all because of the eruptions and the activity of the volcano. The soil is really something else. We have one vineyard in the village called Bianca Villa which when you walk through it you create clouds of dust and ash; there is no limestone nor clay. Then in Belpasso, the other location, we have rocks that you can’t even walk on because they’ll hurt you. That’s why we decided to partner with someone. Although exciting, the idea of planting on Etna by ourselves, I don’t think we would have good results. Alberto is a fundamental partner.

We have a style and there are certain wines that have characteristics that we like. The stylistic approach remains the same, even though the wines are totally different. I like wines with proper perfume, that is very important. I like wines that have a mouthfeel; they need to have some tension. I love the tannins in reds. I like acidity and not too much density, simply because for me density bounces back like a wall. When there is less density, I feel that it’s a wine that is welcoming and allows you to explore it. Those are the aspects that I find similar in all our wines.

I agree, there’s definitely a Gaja signature. I want to ask you about your ambitions for the business over the next two decades or so. How would you summarise those?

We are paying attention to a lot of details that I think are important to express ourselves in a more precise way. For example, I’m really excited about the massal selection which we’re bringing forward in Barolo, starting from our oldest vineyards. This time, and differently to the past, the main aspect that we’re looking at are plants that are resilient. Yes, there is the quality aspect to the shape of the bunch, the size, but more important is the resilience. There were a lot of parameters that we took into consideration, signs of sickness or viruses. We have been selecting vines that showed no symptoms. We are lucky here in Langhe because we have diversity thanks to the previous generations who always did massal selection and always selected the best vines. We have a variety that is very connected with the territory and that is performing well even in challenging times of climate change. 2022 was a very hot and dry vintage and the vines performed surprisingly well. I’m excited to see what’s going to happen in the vineyards we plant with the new massal selection. I think, and hope, that we will get more expressed complexity and typicity in the variety of Nebbiolo.

Concerning the Pieve Santa Restituta, we have vineyards that we’ll be including in the production of our existing Brunello. It’s an area where there have been some vintages with wines with 15% alcohol so it’s giving a lot of structure and alcohol to the wines. We have been changing a lot of things in the winery and vineyards and now I’m starting to see the results. The 2018 that is out now, the 2019, the 20 and 21 that will come out in the coming years, for me they’re a bit different to previous vintages thanks to the reconsideration of the production of the plants per hectare, the picking time, the extraction during the pressing. There were a lot of aspects that we took into consideration. In Ca’Marcanda I am excited because every year I feel that it’s the best vintage. I feel that there’s a continuous growth. We have some experimental varieties that we are trying, and we also want to focus on white because whites are important for us at Gaja. We have a wine called Vistamare which is Vermentino Viognier and lately we’ve been adding Fiano di Avellino in the blend. I think that there are some varieties that are coming from the central part of Italy that could fit in well in Bolgheri, so we’ll be experimenting with some others too.

In terms of Etna, Nerello Mascalese is a variety in which you have to be careful with the management of the tannins and the alcohol, so we are focusing in refining our attention to that aspect. We want to refine the aromas of the white and try it with a bit of malolactic fermentation as well. We are very happy this year because we will finally have the cellar finished. Until now we’ve had to stay in one corner of Alberto’s winery which has had complications for him, but now the estate is ready. There will be a big margin of improvement and we can do micro fermentations during this harvest. I see good opportunities there.

If you had to sum up Gaja and its ethos in a few sentences, what would they be?

Gaja stands for a different point of view. For a different take or disruptive attitude. I think that’s always been a characteristic of every generation of my family. Gaja also stands for family values. As I was saying before, for me family is very important when working together as a driving force. Gaja stands for, in terms of the wines and style, an elegance which isn’t fleeting and delicate but instead an elegance with integrity and attention to the preservation of a fresh fruit that persists for years and years.

What country, other than Italy, would you make wine in if you could?

It has to be outside of Italy? Well, someone once told me “Gaia, you should make wines in Walla Walla” – because Gaia Gaja and Walla Walla fits and would make some news… But I’ve not been to Walla Walla, so I’ll need to go and check it out first! I find Canada very interesting, particularly the Ontario area so Prince Edward County and Niagara Falls. I think there is great potential for making fine, elegant wines as they have very interesting soils. There are already producers making some great wines there.

What wine is in your fridge right now?

Allora, I have a bottle of Barbaresco. I have a Riesling from the Mosel. And I was given this one as a gift, but I love it: a bottle of Lambrusco. Perfect for the summer. I must tell you, I’m not really a fan of bubbles but Lambrusco – yes.

Finally… what piece of your advice would you give to your younger self nineteen years ago when joining the family business?

What I have learnt is that, especially when you work with a family, the way that you communicate and express yourself is very important. Sometimes I have ideas that are very clear to me, and I want to express them and quickly arrive at a result. Sometimes I can be too tough and too harsh and don’t always consider the preparation and explanation around it. I’ve definitely learnt that it’s important to listen and explain things in a complete way without rushing. Growing up, and I’m sure we all feel the same at some point, I would say just be more confident about the things that you believe are important to be stressed. When I was younger, I would not stay quiet, but now I would try to explain properly and try not to scare people with my passion!

Thank you Gaia for taking the time to talk to us. It was fascinating to hear about your journey and understand how've you come to run Gaia Winery today.