Doug's second day - Valle D'Aoste, Barolo and Asti
Doug's italian vinous adventure continues through Valle D'Aoste and into Piedmont (with an amazingly insightful diversion into Biodynamic viticulture).
Doug's italian vinous adventure continues through Valle D'Aoste and into Piedmont (with an amazingly insightful diversion into Biodynamic viticulture). DAY TWO: Valle d’Aosta-Barolo-Asti
What you really want to wake up to is a refreshed blue sky and dazzling mountain vistas. This is the classic shortbread tin box scenery that you could just crunch forever.
Valle d’Aosta, to pinpoint the pinprick on the map, is a tiny autonomous region bordered by France to the west, Switzerland to the north and Piedmont to the south and east. It is divided into 74 communes. The population measuring around 120,000 is swelled in the winter by ski-folk who flock to the resorts and in the summer by hikers and other tourists.
First stop was Andrea and Elvira di Barro’s tiny winery. We stood on the south facing hill of Torrette from which the cru of Torrette is named. The vineyards are between 500m-900m (the Mayolet grape grows at the highest altitude). As usual when you are in Italy or France you receive a short historical lesson about the region. Understanding wine, it seems, is not about simply tasting the product (reductive word in the bottle. It starts with the geography, the geology, the peculiarities of the micro-climate, the soil, the sub-soil, the health of the soil, the plant diversity, the insect life, the way the vineyards are laid out, the training and trellising. The people who live in the region and have given their lives to viticulture are an essential part of the dynamic and it is not beyond fancy, when you taste the wines, to experience something of the personality of the growers. Scientists would scoff at these whimsical notions, because all wine flavours to them are about bottled molecular exchange and transformation.
The valley was originally inhabited by Celts and Ligurians before being conquered by the Romans who founded Augusta Praetoria (from which derives the name Aosta) to secure the mountain passes and to fortify the region. After the fall of Rome it was loosely held by a succession of Goths, Lombards, then the Burgundian kings, but was essentially a series of independent fiefs. In the late 12th century Thomas of Savoy granted a charter of liberties that preserved the autonomy, and though this was revoked centuries later that energy towards independence was never far from the surface. It was during the Middle Ages, however, that the wines of the Aosta Valley established a widespread reputation. And they acquired something of a “sacral” character as well because, according to numerous reports, they were used in the rite of exorcism.
Back to the Di Barros. Andrea told us the appellation of Torrette was effectively founded on this hill in 1837 and the wine made always comprised the indigenous grape varieties of Petite Rouge, Gros Rouge, Mayolet and Fumin. Originally, the grapes used to be harvested and left in small boxes for a few days to increase flavour concentration. He explained that this was an area of very little rainfall; add to this the sandy soils and great heat and you have vines which are extremely stressed and resultant natural low yields (30-35hl/ha). No chemicals are used in the vineyard.
Once again the vineyard was composed of numerous minuscule plots. Some plunged straight into the valley towards the Dora Baltea river, others clung to the mountain precariously further up the slopes held in check by stone walls and rock faces. The sun beat down bouncing off the white rocks. According to Andrea the local almond harvest takes place here at the same time as in Sicily; this is essentially a Mediterranean climate with bells on.
For all that people discuss airily extreme viticulture it really reaches its literal and metaphorical peak in Valle d’Aosta. Extreme in the disposition of the vines, a row here a row there, on steep gradients, virtually impossible to tackle with machinery, extreme in the temperature variations and lack of rainfall, extreme(ly) small in the size of the operations and extreme in the cherishing of traditions and local varieties.
Back a bit… back a bit… back a bit… Oops, sorry, too far.
We descended to the winery which was surrounded by lilac, cherry-blossom and almond trees. Andrea glanced at the row of tanks. “We don’t do much in here”, he said, “no filtration, a little bit of bentonite for fining and a touch of sulphur at bottling”. We could make about 25,000 bottles, but we would rather accept the low yields and stick around 18,000. A quick calculation suggested he would be earning all of £8,000 per year for his wine (before tax
That winery tours could all be so mercifully brief. A tank is a tank is a tank for a’ that.
And so to the tasting. Cantina di Barro only produces red wines and a token sweetie for fun. The wines are lip-smacking.
Petite Rouge 2005 – Bright, limpid red. Cranberry-sharp, bright juicy attack, hint of bitter cherry and raspberry pip, easy medium-length almondy finish.
Mayolet 2005 – (This grape has virtually disappeared off the oenological map.) Lovely ruby red colour, deep cherry, rosehip and blueberry fruits on the nose, appealingly fresh in the mouth with good development, lively finish. Imagine a Fleurie with more grip and personality.
Torrette Superiore, Clos de Chateau Feuillet 2005 – This wine undergoes a short period in old barrels. A traditional blend of Petite Rouge (80%), Gros Rouge, Mayolet and Pr’metta, this wine reveals more complexity. The fruit is reminiscent of wild berries and hedgerow fruits, the aromas are verging towards the gamey, almost meaty and the extra palate-weight lifts it to another dimension.
Fumin 2004 – This unoaked cuvee was specially made for Les Caves de Pyrene. Really distinctive with herby-spicy flavours and a rip-snorting fresh fruit finish. Lovely
Fumin 2005 – A blend of oaked and unoaked wine. Dry woody smell and sawdusty fruit. Disappointing
Torrette Vigni di Torrette 2004 – This wine can reach a blockbusting 15% in certain vintages, but nevertheless has superb balance. This wine is homage to the original Torrette grown on Monte Torrette. Opaque crimson-red, it delivers a rich, unctuous nose of strawberries and liquorice with chunky, meaty notes (seasoned by herbs). This wine exhibits a wild Rhone-like feel. The tannins are powerful, but beautifully integrated, and the wood is a just one part of the whole.
Lo Flapi 2004 – an oddity made from the local Moscato grape which is harvested late (between September and November) with several passes through the vineyard selecting only the ripest grapes. After pressing in December the wine ferments slowly for a year reaching 15% with 55-60 g/l residual. Flapi, by the way, is dialect for “skin shrink”.
The wines, like the Di Barros themselves, are natural, generous and true to the locality. I am reminded that complexity is a false god to admire and that purity or typicity of flavour is achieved with less intervention and less conscious extraction. The greatest wines will inevitably appeal both to our intellect and emotion; otherwise I will always favour the wines that appeal to my emotion, that I feel “on the pulses” over the glitteringly insincere, meretriciously vacuous, carefully constructed, highly wrought wines designed to win competitions and appeal to critics. The wines that attract me most have the quality of gratia placendia, a mouth-watering drinkability that slakes thirst and gets the gastric juices bubbling.
Poets, like painters, thus unskilled to trace
The naked nature and the living grace,
With gold and jewels cover every part,
And hide with ornaments their want of art
It was only a ten minute trundle to Les Crêtes, Costantino Charrère’s winery across the valley. If the di Barros were laid-back, Charrère was a one-man oompah band brassily booming for Valle d’Aosta itself in general and his wines in particular. A former ski instructor he hurtled up the slopes in a blur, a windmill of gesticulation. I kept expecting him to say “beep-beep” and disappear in puff of dust like road-runner and although I trotted after him with my notebook like some winded faithful recording angel endeavouring to gather the philosophical pearls as they tumbled from his lips, he always seemed ten steps ahead. One word that cropped up even from a distance was “biodiversity” and certainly there seemed a welter of bug life inhabiting the vineyard. I ended up with my jeans covered in sticky spider-webs from where I had gingerly picked my path between the vines.
Getting in touch with your inner terroir
We all climbed, at varying pace, the famous Coteau de la Tour, named after the tower that stands sentinel at the top of the first ridge. Whilst elucidating the various training systems of the vines Charrère would throw in a sotto voce observation about Australians (or was it Australia in general which had us scrambling in his wake to find out whether he would expound further. Were there an Aussie present you sense he would gorgonize them from head to foot with his proud contumely. Whatever the reason for his unbridled scorn I couldn’t ascertain but many thousands of miles away a bunch of wine-growers couldn’t give a four x.
Charrere recruits willing new vineyard workers
Charrère reeled off a litany of climatic facts and vineyard practices that determined the nature of his wines: the microclimate (less rain than Sicily), the glacial soils, the completely manual work in the vineyard, the benign neglect (allowing grass to grow between the vines to maintain biodiversity). At one stage during his yomp he exhorted us to lie down between the vines and feel the earth beneath our bodies – like Antaeus. Finally, a true peroration, forza aosta if you like, wherein he fixed each of us with the glittering eye of the Ancient Mariner and let rip politically about the true origins of wine. “Let the territory, the men, the passion, the culture be translated through the grapes into the wine.” “Only here (in Europe) is this understood.” It is interesting how all the growers are defenders of the faith – some more evangelical than others – their objective to capture in their wines some of the essence of the extraordinary Alpine valley. The continuing commercialisation of wine has necessarily created a uniformity of style, a reduction of numbers of grape varieties and a general orientation towards branding. The future, I believe, lies in reacquainting ourselves with “real wines”, seeking out and preserving the unusual, the distinctive and the avowedly individual.
Charrère led us back to the winery (spotlessly clean) for lunch and a tasting of a small selection wines. We enjoyed a local speciality and mainstay of the Valle d’Aostan diet: slow-cooked carbonade made with beef, polenta, sausage, onions, white wine, laurel and juniper. Some of the polenta had stuck to the bottom of the pan and Charrère went among us distributing the crispy burnt bits like so many communion wafers. My travelling companions had seconds, thirds and fourths of the delicious stew.
The best bit of the polenta (and that’s the copper bottomed truth)
An impressive tasting featured the following wines:
Chardonnay Frissonnière 2006 – This is an unoaked version (their other Chardonnay is called Cuvée Bois) and what a wine! Green-gold with fine citrus aromas of mandarin, orange zest and lime, excellent acidity ricocheting around the palate keeping the flavours coming, but also a suggestion of smoke and flinty minerality at the end to indicate ageing potential.
Petite Arvine 2006 – A variety seen predominantly in Switzerland, this version sings of meadow-blossom with its fragrant notes of broom and white flowers. Classic palate of apple-skin and grapefruit, medium finish with refreshing acidity.
Fumin 2005 – More colour than the wine tasted at Di Barro. Unfiltered red bursting with purple fruits, peppery spices and vanilla. Excellent structure and lovely balance (only 12.5%)
Coteau de la Tour – Made from 100% Syrah with an opaque purple-red colour this wine from the hot south-facing slopes has a tremendous bouquet of sweet blackberries and rich, smoky-velvety fruit. Superb.
We said our goodbyes and piled on to the bus for a three hour drive to Piedmont.
A Digression Concerning Biodynamics
All the growers in Valle d’Aosta seemed to be practising a form of “biological agriculture” and I’m aware with our forthcoming tasting called “Real Wine” and a recent blogathon in The World of Fine Wine anatomising biodynamics that I had better define my terminology a bit more clearly. The notion of organic viticulture seems to me mainly proscriptive: it tells growers that, in order to achieve certified status, they must not do x,y and z in their vineyards. There is no clear set of guiding principles with organic viticulture and too many bodies with their separate political agendas administering the certification. Biodynamics is more proactive; it is a mixture of intuition, logic, ethics and sustainable farming practice. It is founded on respect for the environment.
Biodynamics is regarded by its most fervent adherents as the saviour of the planet, a spiritual Gaian link with earth, or as hippy-trippy nonsense by so-called scientists and professional sceptics. Most of the arguments have taken Rudolph Steiner’s philosophy and subjected it to the kind of analytical exegesis reserved for Old Testament prophets by fundamentalists. Certainly, he had many far-out ideas that don’t bear much critical scrutiny. The real world, however, is the one where the farmers work and take decisions and not the one where one’s knowledge of life is gleaned through reading scientific journals. (There are more things in heaven and earth etc.) I read post after post on The World of Fine Wine web-blog which seemed to posit an adversarial domaine of the slick dispassionate scientist versus the ignorant peasant who believes in a voodoo religion called biodynamics. The scientist is determined in a typically contrarian pseudo-academic fashion to create a “straw man” of the biodynamic philosophy and thump it to bits. As well as being couched in depressing jargon many of the posts and articles were just intellectually lazy. Science, as Wordsworth would say, murders to dissect; it exists to disprove and what it can’t disprove, it ignores. Science, as we know, derives from the Latin scientia (knowledge) and knowledge exists in many forms and can be reached by many paths (I sound like a Chinese fortune cookie). Not all experiments can be conducted in Petri dishes nor all life reduced to mathematical equations. “The road from methodological reductionism (we study only what we happen to have the appropriate measuring instruments to see) to ontological reductionism (the only things that exist are what we are able to measure) is dangerously short.” (Granstedt, Kumlander, Schiotz, Skaftnesmo)
I did agree with Beverley Blanning’s following observation: “Biodynamics encourages open-mindedness, curiosity, willingness to learn, and an acceptance that there are still elements of nature that go beyond the scope of conventional science. To use the example of the moon, how relevant is it for winemakers to know that the moon’s gravity exerts a force of less than a hundredth of a gram on a human body, when they can clearly see the effects of racking wine at different phases of the moon? André Ostertag is typical in his view when he says: “There are many things in biodynamics I can’t explain, but I believe it because I see the effects. I can’t explain why the preparations have such an impact, but they do—you can see it in one plant against another.” Olivier Humbrecht MW has been convinced by similar personal experiences. He relates how he discovered the importance of ploughing according to the biodynamic calendar. He ploughed one row at the recommended time, and the next a few days later. In the second, the weeds grew back right away. Of course, this has no scientific validity whatsoever. And of course, Humbrecht, an intelligent chap, knows this very well.”
Anything which goes against the scientific grain is quickly labelled as a cult. Although wine growers exchange ideas freely they are not in the thrall to a single governing notion of biodynamics. Didier Barral said: “I am not biodynamic. The earth and the moon existed before I did and will do so after I die”. Luc de Conti who nourishes his vines with herbal tisanes is sceptical about the influence of the moon and the planets. For him it is the health of the soil that is paramount. In a sense they and other organic growers are mainly kicking against the nastier products of scientific research, the same science, which in the name of efficiency and progress has embraced technology for technology’s sake, encouraging the industrialization of farming with the consequent virtual rape of the soil and destruction of natural habitat and biodiversity, which has created the chemicals that pollute the water table, which has weakened the plant’s natural resistance… one could go on. Science has its own quack nostrums and scientists are more than happy to advertise them (until something new supersedes them).
Biodynamics, stripped of all the persiflage, is simply about understanding and helping to create balance in the vineyard using only natural remedies. The ultimate objective of biodynamics is to achieve typicity, the notion being that the ultimate product (in this case wine) should taste of the place that it came from.
Which leads us to real wine. What is real wine? In one sense it is the antithesis or antidote to mass-produced, branded wines and the prevalent pretentious modern style of over-manipulated, over-flavoured, over-acidified, over-harvested, over-filtered and over-oaked wines that seem to dominate the shelves of the supermarkets and high streets.
Real wine, however, is not simply a broad counter-blast; it is set of ideas underpinned by certain strong ethical principles. Although the practices in the vines and the cellars could never be codified in a strict charter, there is a rational attempt to tie together essential common practice. The priorities are: the life of the soil; a search for terroir; selection massale; the attachment to historic grape varieties and the refusal of the increasing trend to plant standard varieties; the use of organic treatments; the search for good vine health through natural balance; the refusal of GMOs; the prudent use of chemical plant treatments; the search for full maturity; manual harvests; the respect for the variability of vintages; the refusal to chaptalize systematically; natural fermentations; a sparing or zero use of SO2; minimum or no filtration; the refusal of standard definition of taste of wines by certain enological or market trends; the possibility of experimenting and questioning different aspects of work; respect of history, of roots…
Various movements such as Slow Food, La Renaissance des Appellations and the Soil Association are pushing the political agenda. Meanwhile, by understanding and promoting typicity and by espousing natural or organic practices in the vineyard, a new wave of growers is creating a sensible foundation for a renewed appellation controllée system, one that rewards richness of diversity and complexity.
I am conscious throughout this debate of the abundance of what politicians describe as terminological inexactitudes. Proponents of Steiner and the biodynamic philosophy use quasi-religious language: they talk about spirit, energy, dynamism, balance and cosmos. Winemakers are engaged in trying to make the best wine they can and the health of the vines determines that path. Many great vignerons have arrived at biodynamics by trial and error; for others it is a tenet of their holistic philosophy. Instead of worrying about the linguistic niceties let’s look at one rather encouraging fact: that a large proportion of the producers making the greatest wines in the world are self-styled biodynamic producers.
Historic Barolo
The three hour drive from Valle d’Aosta can properly be described as dreary. You bowl along through flaccid countryside under smog-ridden skies. The pollution in northern Italy taints everything. We finally arrive and are met by the gregarious Giorgio in his Sheffield Wednesday sweatshirt ( and stand on one of the highest points looking down at the famous landmarks. It was like examining a map; the terrain was splintered with innumerable vineyards, very like Burgundy. Dario is an admirable guide giving me a potted geography lesson.
Apparently they deliver Barolo by truck every morning to every household in Piedmont so they can pour it over their cornflakes
Barolo, like Chablis for example, is a tiny village. The Borgogno family has been in residence for nine generations and the estate now comprises some 20 hectares of south facing Nebbiolo disposed amongst the vineyards of Cannubi, Cannubi Boschis, Liste, Brunate e S. Pieter) exclusively from the Barolo district. Bartolomeo Borgogno founded his winery in 1761; upon his death in 1794 his three sons took over control of the business, though only one, the youngest, Giacomo, persevered. When he was little more than a boy, Eugenio Giuseppe, born in 1827, took over from his father and signed a contract to provide wine to a boarding school for the sons of army officers (Esercito Sabaudo di Racconigi) in 1848. This was the first legal document in which the firm is cited, and, it turned out to play a fundamental role in the company’s more recent history, for in 1955, the French Institute of Appellations filed a lawsuit filed seeking to block the further use of the name Borgogno because of its similarity to the French word Bourgogne. Those crazy French. The house was in grave danger, but the case was quashed thanks to Eugenio Giuseppe’s foresight. In 1861 Borgogno Barolo was served at an official banquet presided over by Garibaldi celebrating the unification of Italy. More recently the wine appeared in one of the Godfather movies!
We discovered that they are proud to work organically; no herbicides are used, only natural products. To do this you have to understand the weather, the local conditions and analyse the risks, but ultimately the way to achieve quality and to protect the environment for future generations is to ensure that you don’t pollute the ground with chemicals.
The local AA service tows away broken truck
We walked through the capacious cool cellars and marvelled at the enormous old Slavonian botti. We also saw the old vintages stored against the thick walls, the bottles caked with dust. Since the 1950s the winery has made it a policy to keep aside a few thousand bottles of each vintage for collectors and sommeliers. They taste the wines frequently to ensure that they are in good condition and when an order is placed they decant the wine into a fresh bottle very carefully and recork it.
No-one’s been dusting, I see
During the tasting we assayed the 2001 Barolo which was showing very well, the 1999 which was out of kilter and the 1961 which was so fresh it pinched your cheeks like a fairy-tale grandmother. It grew even bolder after about ten minutes in the glass. We also tried a Freisa, a pale rosehip scented wine of tongue-tingling acidity – this would be perfect in the summer after a five minute sojourn in an ice bucket – and a Chinato, which if you like that sort of thing is the sort of thing you like.
2001 Barolo Classico
Classic by name and classic in style. Restrained nose of ground spice (cumin, nutmeg) and dried fruits (prunes, figs). Savoury-tarry attack on the palate, grainy tannins, which begin to melt as the wine warms in the glass. The acidity comes into play giving the wine a purer, more linear composition and adding length to the finish. 2010 – 2030
1961 Barolo Riserva
Medium ruby, with a hint of brick at the rim but otherwise showing very little signs of its age. The aromatic nose displays menthol, anise, and delicate, sweet flavours of dried cherries, finishing with tremendous freshness and a seamless, long and fresh finish. The wine is very lively, the grainy tannins giving grip and definition. Now - 2015
Taste the history – the village of Barolo under smoggy skies
I think I’m having a belated love affair with the Nebbiolo grape. The older wines unveil big, gamey aromas, tobacco, tanned leather, fruitcake and vanilla with a whiff of earth and often reveal a palate with savoury raspberry flavours bolstered by fresh acidity and powdered tannins; the younger example have that classic nose of dried rose, tea, tobacco and nutmeg. The wines are pleasingly shot through with contradiction: virile yet feminine, austere yet aromatic, tannic yet fine, powerful yet delicate. Whenever I taste a good Barolo or Barbaresco I have this strange reverie wherein I imagine all wines are comic book heroes and villains from a camp 1960s TV series. Barolo and Barbaresco are Batman and Robin; Bordeaux is the Joker (naturally) and Burgundy is the Riddler. In my dreamy scenario the latter two are having seven bells knocked out of them by the former.
As per usual we were running a couple of hours late and still we still had to reach Canelli in Asti and Bera where Alessandra Bera was awaiting our arrival.
They do what it says on the label
The drive through the Langhe hills reveals a rolling landscape of orchards and almond trees and green fields and copse-clustered slopes. The Bera farm wears its organic credentials proudly. The vineyards are beautiful: 10 hectares in total with five on steep south-facing slopes (these are the Moscato vines). They are verdant with grass and weeds in abundance, fava beans (beanz meanz wines) are sown between the rows as they absorb oxygen and pass it into the soil. Plus they can be consumed with a ham actor and a bottle of good Barolo (not Chianti as the film had it). The soils are limestone-clay and deep and not compact. Alessandra pointed towards her neighbour’s vineyards which looked like a dustbowl in comparison.
You can smell the air here. It is breezy in the hills with refreshing wafts of wild mint from the fields (it grows freely amongst the vines). Alessandra says you can taste it in the wine and I do remember thinking that the Moscato and Barbera had this delicious fresh herbal inflection.
Call that a vineyard (over there); this is a vineyard!
Everything is done painstakingly by hand; the excess foliage is plucked, the fruit selected and placed in small cagettes. Viticulture can be high maintenance.
We had dinner in the winery on a massive oak refectory table. The quality of the produce was exceptional: highlights included thick rounds of squidgy oh-so-meaty sausage and herbal goat’s cheese, followed by pasta and bean broth of wondrous refined rusticity and an apple pie to go to bed in. This is what I dreamed Italian food would be like – made with enormous care and love for the ingredients.
With the dinner we had the full range of wines from Bera. We have always admired them for their naturalness and authenticity; these are unfiltered wines with native yeasts. The reds, especially the Barberas, seem alive, being rasping, prickly and darting across the tongue. They don’t always taste exactly the same from day to day, but that is part of the charm of being a natural product. I have experienced variance in so many of our best growers’ wines. I can imagine that for some people this might constitute a fault: supermarkets, for example, demand rigorous consistency. To me that is a sterile philosophy. If wine is truly a living thing we must allow for occasional variability. Nevertheless, when you taste, you need to adjust your expectations and try to understand where the wine is coming from. Submitting a wine to analysis is like looking at a human being through a microscope; yes, you can see every flaw in the skin, but such flaws make up who and what we are. We live in a pseudo-scientific culture wherein we dissect so precisely and demand so much that we lose sight of the essential truth: enjoyment! As Ralph Waldo Emerson says: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
A neat summary of the difference between real wines and branded products.
My comments on the two Barberas are filched from our wine catalogue (excuse me for quoting myself
The unfiltered Barbera “Le Verrane”, fermented in cement tank, is true to type with varietal notes of mulberry, cherry-soda, balsam and mint and faint traces of liquorice on a palate that drives all the way. The wine undergoes its malolactic in the bottle; do not be surprised to get a Lambrusco-style tongue-prickling epiphany. This unpredictable red is a party in glass, vinous space dust. It is frivolously serious with a charming bitter-sour contrariness guaranteed to offend the techno-squeakers, nit-pickers and fault-fetishists. The vivid Ronco Malo is classic Barbera cherry-amour; it brilliantly grips tongue, throat and attention.
The Ronco Malo seems to capture the philosophy of Bera and of Asti in general. I am reminded of an occasion when a wine buyer/consultant called me and asked whether we listed a Barbera d’Alba. “Only wines from Asti”, I said (proudly). “Oh”, she said, “not my style – too rustic”. “That’s why I like them”, I replied. The Ronco Malo is intense, but utterly pure, displaying what the French called nerve or tension. It tastes like a terroir wine through-and-through: wild yeastiness crunched together with cherries, earth, stones and herbs and it properly insists on food: that slightly astringent rasp calls for any part of the pig that’s in the pot.
Le Verrane, as the above note implies, is beyond left field. I have previously enjoyed the wine served directly from the fridge where the cool acidity sharpens the morello cherry fruit. It’s the classic charcuterie wine, although I don’t believe in Italy you need an excuse to bring out an array of delicious ham and sausage!
Moscato d’Asti can be drunk either as an aperitif or at the end of the meal. Many Moscatos are slightly sickly cheap confections; the delicious Bera version is from old vines and has a touch of minerality and lovely herbal quality behind the customary orange peel and grapefruit notes. Moscato/Muscat is a guilty pleasure – I can’t analyse a flavour that I like so much. I think the English palate needs to understand that a wine can be enjoyed and admired at the same time!
The hospitality of the Beras was a highlight of our visit to this part of Italy. My one regret is that we arrived late and somewhat exhausted after a rigorous schedule of running around vineyards, tasting and driving. I think I was suffering from botti-fatigue! There were many questions to be asked about the wines and the philosophical values of biodynamics. Next time – I’m sure we will come back soon.
Back on to the coach and a drive to a small town whose name escapes me and fall into a nondescript hotel. Tomorrow is an early start. We have a five hour drive across northern Italy to Trentino to visit Foradori and then right up into the Isarco in the South Tyrol to see the Cantina Valle Isarco.
What you really want to wake up to is a refreshed blue sky and dazzling mountain vistas. This is the classic shortbread tin box scenery that you could just crunch forever.
Valle d’Aosta, to pinpoint the pinprick on the map, is a tiny autonomous region bordered by France to the west, Switzerland to the north and Piedmont to the south and east. It is divided into 74 communes. The population measuring around 120,000 is swelled in the winter by ski-folk who flock to the resorts and in the summer by hikers and other tourists.
First stop was Andrea and Elvira di Barro’s tiny winery. We stood on the south facing hill of Torrette from which the cru of Torrette is named. The vineyards are between 500m-900m (the Mayolet grape grows at the highest altitude). As usual when you are in Italy or France you receive a short historical lesson about the region. Understanding wine, it seems, is not about simply tasting the product (reductive word in the bottle. It starts with the geography, the geology, the peculiarities of the micro-climate, the soil, the sub-soil, the health of the soil, the plant diversity, the insect life, the way the vineyards are laid out, the training and trellising. The people who live in the region and have given their lives to viticulture are an essential part of the dynamic and it is not beyond fancy, when you taste the wines, to experience something of the personality of the growers. Scientists would scoff at these whimsical notions, because all wine flavours to them are about bottled molecular exchange and transformation.
The valley was originally inhabited by Celts and Ligurians before being conquered by the Romans who founded Augusta Praetoria (from which derives the name Aosta) to secure the mountain passes and to fortify the region. After the fall of Rome it was loosely held by a succession of Goths, Lombards, then the Burgundian kings, but was essentially a series of independent fiefs. In the late 12th century Thomas of Savoy granted a charter of liberties that preserved the autonomy, and though this was revoked centuries later that energy towards independence was never far from the surface. It was during the Middle Ages, however, that the wines of the Aosta Valley established a widespread reputation. And they acquired something of a “sacral” character as well because, according to numerous reports, they were used in the rite of exorcism.
Back to the Di Barros. Andrea told us the appellation of Torrette was effectively founded on this hill in 1837 and the wine made always comprised the indigenous grape varieties of Petite Rouge, Gros Rouge, Mayolet and Fumin. Originally, the grapes used to be harvested and left in small boxes for a few days to increase flavour concentration. He explained that this was an area of very little rainfall; add to this the sandy soils and great heat and you have vines which are extremely stressed and resultant natural low yields (30-35hl/ha). No chemicals are used in the vineyard.
Once again the vineyard was composed of numerous minuscule plots. Some plunged straight into the valley towards the Dora Baltea river, others clung to the mountain precariously further up the slopes held in check by stone walls and rock faces. The sun beat down bouncing off the white rocks. According to Andrea the local almond harvest takes place here at the same time as in Sicily; this is essentially a Mediterranean climate with bells on.
For all that people discuss airily extreme viticulture it really reaches its literal and metaphorical peak in Valle d’Aosta. Extreme in the disposition of the vines, a row here a row there, on steep gradients, virtually impossible to tackle with machinery, extreme in the temperature variations and lack of rainfall, extreme(ly) small in the size of the operations and extreme in the cherishing of traditions and local varieties.
Back a bit… back a bit… back a bit… Oops, sorry, too far.
We descended to the winery which was surrounded by lilac, cherry-blossom and almond trees. Andrea glanced at the row of tanks. “We don’t do much in here”, he said, “no filtration, a little bit of bentonite for fining and a touch of sulphur at bottling”. We could make about 25,000 bottles, but we would rather accept the low yields and stick around 18,000. A quick calculation suggested he would be earning all of £8,000 per year for his wine (before tax
That winery tours could all be so mercifully brief. A tank is a tank is a tank for a’ that.
And so to the tasting. Cantina di Barro only produces red wines and a token sweetie for fun. The wines are lip-smacking.
Petite Rouge 2005 – Bright, limpid red. Cranberry-sharp, bright juicy attack, hint of bitter cherry and raspberry pip, easy medium-length almondy finish.
Mayolet 2005 – (This grape has virtually disappeared off the oenological map.) Lovely ruby red colour, deep cherry, rosehip and blueberry fruits on the nose, appealingly fresh in the mouth with good development, lively finish. Imagine a Fleurie with more grip and personality.
Torrette Superiore, Clos de Chateau Feuillet 2005 – This wine undergoes a short period in old barrels. A traditional blend of Petite Rouge (80%), Gros Rouge, Mayolet and Pr’metta, this wine reveals more complexity. The fruit is reminiscent of wild berries and hedgerow fruits, the aromas are verging towards the gamey, almost meaty and the extra palate-weight lifts it to another dimension.
Fumin 2004 – This unoaked cuvee was specially made for Les Caves de Pyrene. Really distinctive with herby-spicy flavours and a rip-snorting fresh fruit finish. Lovely
Fumin 2005 – A blend of oaked and unoaked wine. Dry woody smell and sawdusty fruit. Disappointing
Torrette Vigni di Torrette 2004 – This wine can reach a blockbusting 15% in certain vintages, but nevertheless has superb balance. This wine is homage to the original Torrette grown on Monte Torrette. Opaque crimson-red, it delivers a rich, unctuous nose of strawberries and liquorice with chunky, meaty notes (seasoned by herbs). This wine exhibits a wild Rhone-like feel. The tannins are powerful, but beautifully integrated, and the wood is a just one part of the whole.
Lo Flapi 2004 – an oddity made from the local Moscato grape which is harvested late (between September and November) with several passes through the vineyard selecting only the ripest grapes. After pressing in December the wine ferments slowly for a year reaching 15% with 55-60 g/l residual. Flapi, by the way, is dialect for “skin shrink”.
The wines, like the Di Barros themselves, are natural, generous and true to the locality. I am reminded that complexity is a false god to admire and that purity or typicity of flavour is achieved with less intervention and less conscious extraction. The greatest wines will inevitably appeal both to our intellect and emotion; otherwise I will always favour the wines that appeal to my emotion, that I feel “on the pulses” over the glitteringly insincere, meretriciously vacuous, carefully constructed, highly wrought wines designed to win competitions and appeal to critics. The wines that attract me most have the quality of gratia placendia, a mouth-watering drinkability that slakes thirst and gets the gastric juices bubbling.
Poets, like painters, thus unskilled to trace
The naked nature and the living grace,
With gold and jewels cover every part,
And hide with ornaments their want of art
It was only a ten minute trundle to Les Crêtes, Costantino Charrère’s winery across the valley. If the di Barros were laid-back, Charrère was a one-man oompah band brassily booming for Valle d’Aosta itself in general and his wines in particular. A former ski instructor he hurtled up the slopes in a blur, a windmill of gesticulation. I kept expecting him to say “beep-beep” and disappear in puff of dust like road-runner and although I trotted after him with my notebook like some winded faithful recording angel endeavouring to gather the philosophical pearls as they tumbled from his lips, he always seemed ten steps ahead. One word that cropped up even from a distance was “biodiversity” and certainly there seemed a welter of bug life inhabiting the vineyard. I ended up with my jeans covered in sticky spider-webs from where I had gingerly picked my path between the vines.
Getting in touch with your inner terroir
We all climbed, at varying pace, the famous Coteau de la Tour, named after the tower that stands sentinel at the top of the first ridge. Whilst elucidating the various training systems of the vines Charrère would throw in a sotto voce observation about Australians (or was it Australia in general which had us scrambling in his wake to find out whether he would expound further. Were there an Aussie present you sense he would gorgonize them from head to foot with his proud contumely. Whatever the reason for his unbridled scorn I couldn’t ascertain but many thousands of miles away a bunch of wine-growers couldn’t give a four x.
Charrere recruits willing new vineyard workers
Charrère reeled off a litany of climatic facts and vineyard practices that determined the nature of his wines: the microclimate (less rain than Sicily), the glacial soils, the completely manual work in the vineyard, the benign neglect (allowing grass to grow between the vines to maintain biodiversity). At one stage during his yomp he exhorted us to lie down between the vines and feel the earth beneath our bodies – like Antaeus. Finally, a true peroration, forza aosta if you like, wherein he fixed each of us with the glittering eye of the Ancient Mariner and let rip politically about the true origins of wine. “Let the territory, the men, the passion, the culture be translated through the grapes into the wine.” “Only here (in Europe) is this understood.” It is interesting how all the growers are defenders of the faith – some more evangelical than others – their objective to capture in their wines some of the essence of the extraordinary Alpine valley. The continuing commercialisation of wine has necessarily created a uniformity of style, a reduction of numbers of grape varieties and a general orientation towards branding. The future, I believe, lies in reacquainting ourselves with “real wines”, seeking out and preserving the unusual, the distinctive and the avowedly individual.
Charrère led us back to the winery (spotlessly clean) for lunch and a tasting of a small selection wines. We enjoyed a local speciality and mainstay of the Valle d’Aostan diet: slow-cooked carbonade made with beef, polenta, sausage, onions, white wine, laurel and juniper. Some of the polenta had stuck to the bottom of the pan and Charrère went among us distributing the crispy burnt bits like so many communion wafers. My travelling companions had seconds, thirds and fourths of the delicious stew.
The best bit of the polenta (and that’s the copper bottomed truth)
An impressive tasting featured the following wines:
Chardonnay Frissonnière 2006 – This is an unoaked version (their other Chardonnay is called Cuvée Bois) and what a wine! Green-gold with fine citrus aromas of mandarin, orange zest and lime, excellent acidity ricocheting around the palate keeping the flavours coming, but also a suggestion of smoke and flinty minerality at the end to indicate ageing potential.
Petite Arvine 2006 – A variety seen predominantly in Switzerland, this version sings of meadow-blossom with its fragrant notes of broom and white flowers. Classic palate of apple-skin and grapefruit, medium finish with refreshing acidity.
Fumin 2005 – More colour than the wine tasted at Di Barro. Unfiltered red bursting with purple fruits, peppery spices and vanilla. Excellent structure and lovely balance (only 12.5%)
Coteau de la Tour – Made from 100% Syrah with an opaque purple-red colour this wine from the hot south-facing slopes has a tremendous bouquet of sweet blackberries and rich, smoky-velvety fruit. Superb.
We said our goodbyes and piled on to the bus for a three hour drive to Piedmont.
A Digression Concerning Biodynamics
All the growers in Valle d’Aosta seemed to be practising a form of “biological agriculture” and I’m aware with our forthcoming tasting called “Real Wine” and a recent blogathon in The World of Fine Wine anatomising biodynamics that I had better define my terminology a bit more clearly. The notion of organic viticulture seems to me mainly proscriptive: it tells growers that, in order to achieve certified status, they must not do x,y and z in their vineyards. There is no clear set of guiding principles with organic viticulture and too many bodies with their separate political agendas administering the certification. Biodynamics is more proactive; it is a mixture of intuition, logic, ethics and sustainable farming practice. It is founded on respect for the environment.
Biodynamics is regarded by its most fervent adherents as the saviour of the planet, a spiritual Gaian link with earth, or as hippy-trippy nonsense by so-called scientists and professional sceptics. Most of the arguments have taken Rudolph Steiner’s philosophy and subjected it to the kind of analytical exegesis reserved for Old Testament prophets by fundamentalists. Certainly, he had many far-out ideas that don’t bear much critical scrutiny. The real world, however, is the one where the farmers work and take decisions and not the one where one’s knowledge of life is gleaned through reading scientific journals. (There are more things in heaven and earth etc.) I read post after post on The World of Fine Wine web-blog which seemed to posit an adversarial domaine of the slick dispassionate scientist versus the ignorant peasant who believes in a voodoo religion called biodynamics. The scientist is determined in a typically contrarian pseudo-academic fashion to create a “straw man” of the biodynamic philosophy and thump it to bits. As well as being couched in depressing jargon many of the posts and articles were just intellectually lazy. Science, as Wordsworth would say, murders to dissect; it exists to disprove and what it can’t disprove, it ignores. Science, as we know, derives from the Latin scientia (knowledge) and knowledge exists in many forms and can be reached by many paths (I sound like a Chinese fortune cookie). Not all experiments can be conducted in Petri dishes nor all life reduced to mathematical equations. “The road from methodological reductionism (we study only what we happen to have the appropriate measuring instruments to see) to ontological reductionism (the only things that exist are what we are able to measure) is dangerously short.” (Granstedt, Kumlander, Schiotz, Skaftnesmo)
I did agree with Beverley Blanning’s following observation: “Biodynamics encourages open-mindedness, curiosity, willingness to learn, and an acceptance that there are still elements of nature that go beyond the scope of conventional science. To use the example of the moon, how relevant is it for winemakers to know that the moon’s gravity exerts a force of less than a hundredth of a gram on a human body, when they can clearly see the effects of racking wine at different phases of the moon? André Ostertag is typical in his view when he says: “There are many things in biodynamics I can’t explain, but I believe it because I see the effects. I can’t explain why the preparations have such an impact, but they do—you can see it in one plant against another.” Olivier Humbrecht MW has been convinced by similar personal experiences. He relates how he discovered the importance of ploughing according to the biodynamic calendar. He ploughed one row at the recommended time, and the next a few days later. In the second, the weeds grew back right away. Of course, this has no scientific validity whatsoever. And of course, Humbrecht, an intelligent chap, knows this very well.”
Anything which goes against the scientific grain is quickly labelled as a cult. Although wine growers exchange ideas freely they are not in the thrall to a single governing notion of biodynamics. Didier Barral said: “I am not biodynamic. The earth and the moon existed before I did and will do so after I die”. Luc de Conti who nourishes his vines with herbal tisanes is sceptical about the influence of the moon and the planets. For him it is the health of the soil that is paramount. In a sense they and other organic growers are mainly kicking against the nastier products of scientific research, the same science, which in the name of efficiency and progress has embraced technology for technology’s sake, encouraging the industrialization of farming with the consequent virtual rape of the soil and destruction of natural habitat and biodiversity, which has created the chemicals that pollute the water table, which has weakened the plant’s natural resistance… one could go on. Science has its own quack nostrums and scientists are more than happy to advertise them (until something new supersedes them).
Biodynamics, stripped of all the persiflage, is simply about understanding and helping to create balance in the vineyard using only natural remedies. The ultimate objective of biodynamics is to achieve typicity, the notion being that the ultimate product (in this case wine) should taste of the place that it came from.
Which leads us to real wine. What is real wine? In one sense it is the antithesis or antidote to mass-produced, branded wines and the prevalent pretentious modern style of over-manipulated, over-flavoured, over-acidified, over-harvested, over-filtered and over-oaked wines that seem to dominate the shelves of the supermarkets and high streets.
Real wine, however, is not simply a broad counter-blast; it is set of ideas underpinned by certain strong ethical principles. Although the practices in the vines and the cellars could never be codified in a strict charter, there is a rational attempt to tie together essential common practice. The priorities are: the life of the soil; a search for terroir; selection massale; the attachment to historic grape varieties and the refusal of the increasing trend to plant standard varieties; the use of organic treatments; the search for good vine health through natural balance; the refusal of GMOs; the prudent use of chemical plant treatments; the search for full maturity; manual harvests; the respect for the variability of vintages; the refusal to chaptalize systematically; natural fermentations; a sparing or zero use of SO2; minimum or no filtration; the refusal of standard definition of taste of wines by certain enological or market trends; the possibility of experimenting and questioning different aspects of work; respect of history, of roots…
Various movements such as Slow Food, La Renaissance des Appellations and the Soil Association are pushing the political agenda. Meanwhile, by understanding and promoting typicity and by espousing natural or organic practices in the vineyard, a new wave of growers is creating a sensible foundation for a renewed appellation controllée system, one that rewards richness of diversity and complexity.
I am conscious throughout this debate of the abundance of what politicians describe as terminological inexactitudes. Proponents of Steiner and the biodynamic philosophy use quasi-religious language: they talk about spirit, energy, dynamism, balance and cosmos. Winemakers are engaged in trying to make the best wine they can and the health of the vines determines that path. Many great vignerons have arrived at biodynamics by trial and error; for others it is a tenet of their holistic philosophy. Instead of worrying about the linguistic niceties let’s look at one rather encouraging fact: that a large proportion of the producers making the greatest wines in the world are self-styled biodynamic producers.
Historic Barolo
The three hour drive from Valle d’Aosta can properly be described as dreary. You bowl along through flaccid countryside under smog-ridden skies. The pollution in northern Italy taints everything. We finally arrive and are met by the gregarious Giorgio in his Sheffield Wednesday sweatshirt ( and stand on one of the highest points looking down at the famous landmarks. It was like examining a map; the terrain was splintered with innumerable vineyards, very like Burgundy. Dario is an admirable guide giving me a potted geography lesson.
Apparently they deliver Barolo by truck every morning to every household in Piedmont so they can pour it over their cornflakes
Barolo, like Chablis for example, is a tiny village. The Borgogno family has been in residence for nine generations and the estate now comprises some 20 hectares of south facing Nebbiolo disposed amongst the vineyards of Cannubi, Cannubi Boschis, Liste, Brunate e S. Pieter) exclusively from the Barolo district. Bartolomeo Borgogno founded his winery in 1761; upon his death in 1794 his three sons took over control of the business, though only one, the youngest, Giacomo, persevered. When he was little more than a boy, Eugenio Giuseppe, born in 1827, took over from his father and signed a contract to provide wine to a boarding school for the sons of army officers (Esercito Sabaudo di Racconigi) in 1848. This was the first legal document in which the firm is cited, and, it turned out to play a fundamental role in the company’s more recent history, for in 1955, the French Institute of Appellations filed a lawsuit filed seeking to block the further use of the name Borgogno because of its similarity to the French word Bourgogne. Those crazy French. The house was in grave danger, but the case was quashed thanks to Eugenio Giuseppe’s foresight. In 1861 Borgogno Barolo was served at an official banquet presided over by Garibaldi celebrating the unification of Italy. More recently the wine appeared in one of the Godfather movies!
We discovered that they are proud to work organically; no herbicides are used, only natural products. To do this you have to understand the weather, the local conditions and analyse the risks, but ultimately the way to achieve quality and to protect the environment for future generations is to ensure that you don’t pollute the ground with chemicals.
The local AA service tows away broken truck
We walked through the capacious cool cellars and marvelled at the enormous old Slavonian botti. We also saw the old vintages stored against the thick walls, the bottles caked with dust. Since the 1950s the winery has made it a policy to keep aside a few thousand bottles of each vintage for collectors and sommeliers. They taste the wines frequently to ensure that they are in good condition and when an order is placed they decant the wine into a fresh bottle very carefully and recork it.
No-one’s been dusting, I see
During the tasting we assayed the 2001 Barolo which was showing very well, the 1999 which was out of kilter and the 1961 which was so fresh it pinched your cheeks like a fairy-tale grandmother. It grew even bolder after about ten minutes in the glass. We also tried a Freisa, a pale rosehip scented wine of tongue-tingling acidity – this would be perfect in the summer after a five minute sojourn in an ice bucket – and a Chinato, which if you like that sort of thing is the sort of thing you like.
2001 Barolo Classico
Classic by name and classic in style. Restrained nose of ground spice (cumin, nutmeg) and dried fruits (prunes, figs). Savoury-tarry attack on the palate, grainy tannins, which begin to melt as the wine warms in the glass. The acidity comes into play giving the wine a purer, more linear composition and adding length to the finish. 2010 – 2030
1961 Barolo Riserva
Medium ruby, with a hint of brick at the rim but otherwise showing very little signs of its age. The aromatic nose displays menthol, anise, and delicate, sweet flavours of dried cherries, finishing with tremendous freshness and a seamless, long and fresh finish. The wine is very lively, the grainy tannins giving grip and definition. Now - 2015
Taste the history – the village of Barolo under smoggy skies
I think I’m having a belated love affair with the Nebbiolo grape. The older wines unveil big, gamey aromas, tobacco, tanned leather, fruitcake and vanilla with a whiff of earth and often reveal a palate with savoury raspberry flavours bolstered by fresh acidity and powdered tannins; the younger example have that classic nose of dried rose, tea, tobacco and nutmeg. The wines are pleasingly shot through with contradiction: virile yet feminine, austere yet aromatic, tannic yet fine, powerful yet delicate. Whenever I taste a good Barolo or Barbaresco I have this strange reverie wherein I imagine all wines are comic book heroes and villains from a camp 1960s TV series. Barolo and Barbaresco are Batman and Robin; Bordeaux is the Joker (naturally) and Burgundy is the Riddler. In my dreamy scenario the latter two are having seven bells knocked out of them by the former.
As per usual we were running a couple of hours late and still we still had to reach Canelli in Asti and Bera where Alessandra Bera was awaiting our arrival.
They do what it says on the label
The drive through the Langhe hills reveals a rolling landscape of orchards and almond trees and green fields and copse-clustered slopes. The Bera farm wears its organic credentials proudly. The vineyards are beautiful: 10 hectares in total with five on steep south-facing slopes (these are the Moscato vines). They are verdant with grass and weeds in abundance, fava beans (beanz meanz wines) are sown between the rows as they absorb oxygen and pass it into the soil. Plus they can be consumed with a ham actor and a bottle of good Barolo (not Chianti as the film had it). The soils are limestone-clay and deep and not compact. Alessandra pointed towards her neighbour’s vineyards which looked like a dustbowl in comparison.
You can smell the air here. It is breezy in the hills with refreshing wafts of wild mint from the fields (it grows freely amongst the vines). Alessandra says you can taste it in the wine and I do remember thinking that the Moscato and Barbera had this delicious fresh herbal inflection.
Call that a vineyard (over there); this is a vineyard!
Everything is done painstakingly by hand; the excess foliage is plucked, the fruit selected and placed in small cagettes. Viticulture can be high maintenance.
We had dinner in the winery on a massive oak refectory table. The quality of the produce was exceptional: highlights included thick rounds of squidgy oh-so-meaty sausage and herbal goat’s cheese, followed by pasta and bean broth of wondrous refined rusticity and an apple pie to go to bed in. This is what I dreamed Italian food would be like – made with enormous care and love for the ingredients.
With the dinner we had the full range of wines from Bera. We have always admired them for their naturalness and authenticity; these are unfiltered wines with native yeasts. The reds, especially the Barberas, seem alive, being rasping, prickly and darting across the tongue. They don’t always taste exactly the same from day to day, but that is part of the charm of being a natural product. I have experienced variance in so many of our best growers’ wines. I can imagine that for some people this might constitute a fault: supermarkets, for example, demand rigorous consistency. To me that is a sterile philosophy. If wine is truly a living thing we must allow for occasional variability. Nevertheless, when you taste, you need to adjust your expectations and try to understand where the wine is coming from. Submitting a wine to analysis is like looking at a human being through a microscope; yes, you can see every flaw in the skin, but such flaws make up who and what we are. We live in a pseudo-scientific culture wherein we dissect so precisely and demand so much that we lose sight of the essential truth: enjoyment! As Ralph Waldo Emerson says: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
A neat summary of the difference between real wines and branded products.
My comments on the two Barberas are filched from our wine catalogue (excuse me for quoting myself
The unfiltered Barbera “Le Verrane”, fermented in cement tank, is true to type with varietal notes of mulberry, cherry-soda, balsam and mint and faint traces of liquorice on a palate that drives all the way. The wine undergoes its malolactic in the bottle; do not be surprised to get a Lambrusco-style tongue-prickling epiphany. This unpredictable red is a party in glass, vinous space dust. It is frivolously serious with a charming bitter-sour contrariness guaranteed to offend the techno-squeakers, nit-pickers and fault-fetishists. The vivid Ronco Malo is classic Barbera cherry-amour; it brilliantly grips tongue, throat and attention.
The Ronco Malo seems to capture the philosophy of Bera and of Asti in general. I am reminded of an occasion when a wine buyer/consultant called me and asked whether we listed a Barbera d’Alba. “Only wines from Asti”, I said (proudly). “Oh”, she said, “not my style – too rustic”. “That’s why I like them”, I replied. The Ronco Malo is intense, but utterly pure, displaying what the French called nerve or tension. It tastes like a terroir wine through-and-through: wild yeastiness crunched together with cherries, earth, stones and herbs and it properly insists on food: that slightly astringent rasp calls for any part of the pig that’s in the pot.
Le Verrane, as the above note implies, is beyond left field. I have previously enjoyed the wine served directly from the fridge where the cool acidity sharpens the morello cherry fruit. It’s the classic charcuterie wine, although I don’t believe in Italy you need an excuse to bring out an array of delicious ham and sausage!
Moscato d’Asti can be drunk either as an aperitif or at the end of the meal. Many Moscatos are slightly sickly cheap confections; the delicious Bera version is from old vines and has a touch of minerality and lovely herbal quality behind the customary orange peel and grapefruit notes. Moscato/Muscat is a guilty pleasure – I can’t analyse a flavour that I like so much. I think the English palate needs to understand that a wine can be enjoyed and admired at the same time!
The hospitality of the Beras was a highlight of our visit to this part of Italy. My one regret is that we arrived late and somewhat exhausted after a rigorous schedule of running around vineyards, tasting and driving. I think I was suffering from botti-fatigue! There were many questions to be asked about the wines and the philosophical values of biodynamics. Next time – I’m sure we will come back soon.
Back on to the coach and a drive to a small town whose name escapes me and fall into a nondescript hotel. Tomorrow is an early start. We have a five hour drive across northern Italy to Trentino to visit Foradori and then right up into the Isarco in the South Tyrol to see the Cantina Valle Isarco.
