Piedmont (Piemonte)

Piedmont sits at the foot of the mountains and says so in its name: Pedemontis, first written down in the twelfth century. It is the most single-mindedly serious wine region in Italy — the one that thinks hardest about where exactly a wine came from, and the one that built its reputation on a grape that refuses to be good anywhere else.

The Landscape The region falls into three concentric bands. The outermost is Alpine and Apennine and covers 43 per cent of the surface; the innermost is the flat eastern plain, 26 per cent; between them lies the hill country, 30 per cent of Piedmont and effectively all of its fine wine. Those hills are the floor of a vanished sea. Thirty million years ago this was a rapidly subsiding basin, and what it left behind — conglomerates, sandstones, yellow marl and green clays still full of marine fossils — is what the vines root into today.

Langhe, Roero, Monferrato The Langhe lie on the right bank of the Tanaro, on marls of Middle and Upper Miocene age shot through with bands of sand, and they split in two: the Alta Langa, higher and built of harder rock, and the Bassa Langa, softer and gentler and much the better place to grow grapes. Barolo occupies medium-high hills between 250 and 500 metres, open to the sun and sheltered from the north wind; Barbaresco sits to its north-east, between Treiso, Neive and Alba. Across the river the Roero is younger ground, a shuffle of Miocene and Pliocene clays, marls and sands that suits Arneis as well as it suits Nebbiolo. Monferrato, further east, is sandstone, marl and clay — Barbera, Grignolino and Freisa in the lower part, Dolcetto and Cortese in the high.

The North Is a Different Country Between the Dora Baltea and the Sesia the bedrock changes to ultra-basic green rock and Permian porphyry under fluvio-glacial cover, and on it sit Gattinara, Ghemme, Boca, Bramaterra and Lessona. These acidic, volcanically influenced soils give Nebbiolo a paler colour, higher acidity and a wiry, saline quality quite unlike the Langhe. Further west, Carema holds onto terraces of glacial and metamorphic rock right at the border with the Aosta Valley.

A Long Apprenticeship Monasteries and parish churches drove the medieval plantings, and the paperwork is unusually good. The fourteenth-century Codex Astensis records that Asti was “supplied with good and excellent wine”, and in 1304 Pietro de’ Crescenzi singled out the vine-growing of Monferrato for praise in his Trattato dell’Agricoltura. The same era gave the region the spanna system, vines trained on low stakes and pruned hard to the ground. In the north the word slid off the training method and onto the grape, which is why Nebbiolo is still called Spanna around Gattinara and Ghemme.

The Grapes Nebbiolo is the reason to come and a minority of the vineyard. Barbera is planted far more widely and is the everyday red — high in acid, low in tannin, and much better than its reputation. Dolcetto ripens early and is drunk young; Grignolino, Freisa, Ruchè and Pelaverga are local, idiosyncratic and worth the detour. Among the whites, Moscato Bianco makes Asti, Cortese makes Gavi, Arneis belongs to the Roero, Erbaluce to the Canavese, and Timorasso — pulled back from near-extinction in the Tortona hills — is the most interesting white the region has produced in fifty years.

The Critical Take No Italian region has thought harder about site. Barolo and Barbaresco are mapped into official named vineyards and their growers argue about them the way Burgundians argue about climats. That precision is real, and it has a price: the Langhe has become expensive, and the entry point has drifted out of reach. The value now sits in the north, where a Nebbiolo from Lessona or Boca costs a fraction of a Barolo and makes a different, equally serious argument about the same grape. Barbera, meanwhile, has quietly become very good and is still priced as though it had not.

At the Table The cooking is rich and built for these wines: tajarin with butter and sage, agnolotti del plin, bagna càuda, brasato al Barolo, vitello tonnato, Castelmagno and Robiola, and hazelnuts in everything. When the white truffle of Alba arrives in autumn, a mature Nebbiolo is the only sensible answer.

Where to Start A good Barbera d’Asti or Barbera d’Alba shows the region’s texture at a fair price. For Nebbiolo without the Barolo premium, take a Langhe Nebbiolo from a Barolo house, or go straight to Alto Piemonte. Then drink a Barolo with ten years on it, and the fuss will explain itself.