Carema DOC

One commune, on the last Piedmontese slope before the Val d’Aosta border, and one of the great pieces of heroic viticulture in Italy. Carema makes Nebbiolo on terraces built by hand into a mountainside, in quantities that would not fill a supermarket aisle.

The Terroir The registered file spends its entire description on how the vineyard is built, which tells you where the character comes from. Cultivation is a pergola made up entirely of chestnut cross-beams, with the canes tied onto them to resist the strong winds of the valley. The terraces are held by dry-stone walls and stone pillars — the file gives the local word, topiun — which, beyond retaining the soil, capture the sun’s rays, and which it calls a genuine architectural achievement, the building craft handed down from father to son.

What the Pillars Do This is not decoration. The Dora Baltea valley is a wind tunnel, and Carema sits at around 350 to 700 metres on morainic and glacial ground where Nebbiolo has no business ripening. The squat stone columns absorb heat through the day and release it under the pergola at night; the low canopy sits in that warmth; the walls hold what soil there is on a slope too steep to plough. Every element of the system exists to buy the fruit the degree or two of ripeness the latitude does not supply.

Grape Varieties Nebbiolo, in the local strains the file names as Picutener and Prugnet. Picutener is the Canavese name and is generally taken to mean “light-stalked”; Prugnet points at plum. The file’s tasting description is worth quoting in full: ruby tending to garnet, a nose recalling macerated rose, and a palate that is soft, velvety and full. Minimum alcohol is 12 per cent, and a riserva is made.

The Critical Take Carema is the most delicate expression of Nebbiolo in Italy and it is disappearing. The terraces cannot be mechanised, the plots are minute, and the arithmetic of maintaining dry-stone walls by hand has been losing to the arithmetic of leaving for two generations — the planted area is a fraction of what it was a century ago. What survives is worth the trouble: pale, high-toned, rose and tar and iron, with the tannin fine rather than large, closer to a fine Valtellina or a good Ghemme than to anything in the Langhe. It is also, still, absurdly underpriced for what it is.

At the Table Canavese and Alpine cooking: bagna càuda, boiled meats, roast kid, mountain butter and toma, and mushrooms in autumn. The wine is too fine for heavily sauced dishes. Serve at 16–17°C and give a riserva ten years.

Benchmark Producers Ferrando, whose Black Label is the reference bottle of the appellation, the growers’ cooperative Produttori Nebbiolo di Carema, and Muraje.