Canavese DOC

Ninety-nine communes on the great glacial amphitheatre north of Turin, wrapping around Carema and Erbaluce di Caluso as the umbrella denomination for the whole district. The file’s description of it is unusually enthusiastic for a legal document.

The Terroir The registered file: the vineyards of the Canavese are arranged on the south-facing slopes of a stupendous morainic amphitheatre of glacial origin situated in the north of Piedmont on the border of the Valle d’Aosta. That amphitheatre — the Serra d’Ivrea — is the largest and best-preserved morainic system in Europe, a single ridge some twenty-five kilometres long left by the Balteo glacier. Its soils are acidic, stony and glacially sorted, quite unlike the calcareous marl of southern Piedmont.

The Range The file then does something rare and simply lists what the district makes: from fresh whites obtained with Erbaluce grapes, to perfumed rosés obtained with Bonarda and Freisa grapes, not to forget the excellently structured reds composed of Barbera, Croatina and Nebbiolo grapes. Uva Rara and the rare Neretto di Bairo are also permitted.

The Critical Take Canavese is the everyday tier of a district whose serious names sit inside it — Carema for Nebbiolo, Erbaluce di Caluso for white and passito. That is exactly what a regional denomination should be, and the wines are honest and cheap. The interest is in the ground: acidic glacial moraine is rare in Italy, it gives Nebbiolo a pale, high-toned, iron-edged character quite unlike the Langhe, and the whole district produces less than a large Barolo commune.

Erbaluce The white deserves its own note. It is grown almost nowhere outside the Canavese, gives a sharp, green-apple, almost austere dry wine, and — because its skins are thick and it resists rot — it makes one of the great forgotten Italian sweet wines as Caluso Passito, dried on racks for months. Very few varieties do both those jobs well.

Ninety-Nine Communes The size of the delimitation is itself the point. Canavese was a serious wine district before phylloxera and depopulation, with vines on the moraine from Ivrea up to the Aosta border, and the boundary drawn today reflects what was once planted rather than what is planted now. Within it sit the two names that matter — Carema on its terraces at the northern end, Erbaluce di Caluso on the southern slopes — and a great deal of ground that has gone back to woodland. The umbrella exists partly to keep the map honest.

Ivrea The town at the centre of the amphitheatre is best known for two things that have nothing to do with wine: Olivetti, which built one of the twentieth century’s model industrial towns here, and the Battaglia delle Arance, a three-day carnival in which several thousand people throw oranges at each other. Both tell you the same thing about the Canavese — that it has always been more prosperous and more peculiar than a marginal Alpine district ought to be.

At the Table Canavesano cooking: bagna càuda, boiled meats, tofeja bean stew, roast kid, and toma. Whites at 10–12°C, reds at 15–16°C.

Benchmark Producers Orsolani, Ferrando, Cieck, Favaro.