Valli Ossolane DOC

Alpine viticulture at the top of Piedmont, in the Ossola valleys north of Lake Maggiore where Italy runs out and Switzerland begins. It is one of the smallest and highest denominations in the region, and it exists because a handful of people decided the terraces were worth rebuilding.

The Terroir The registered file is unusually direct about purpose and evidence. The denomination, it says, arises to valorise a particular viticultural area in the territory of the Ossola, in which viticultural activity is attested from 1345 in the Statute of Villadossola. The soils are generated by ancient terraced and undulating fluvial deposits, also rather steep, in an area of strong variability according to location and morphology. And it names the combination that matters: soil type, high thermal excursions, maximum temperatures and solar irradiation, attributable to a mountain climate.

Prünent The red is Nebbiolo, and the local biotype has its own name: Prünent, documented in the Ossola since the early fourteenth century. It ripens in a valley where snow sits on the peaks above the vineyard, on terraces walled in gneiss, and it gives a paler, sharper, more overtly floral Nebbiolo than anything in the Langhe — rose and iron rather than tar and liquorice. There are a few dozen hectares of it.

Grape Varieties Nebbiolo leads the red, with Croatina and Merlot permitted alongside; the white is Chardonnay-based. The disciplinare also carries a long list of Piedmontese and Alpine varieties in support, several of them shared with the Val di Susa at the opposite end of the region.

The Critical Take This is viticulture as conservation. The Ossola had thousands of hectares of vines before the twentieth century and has a rounding error now; the terraces were abandoned as the valleys emptied for work in Switzerland and Milan, and what exists today was largely rebuilt from ruin after 1990. The wine is genuinely good — the Nebbiolo especially, which has a transparency and a nervous acidity that reward anyone who likes the grape in its lighter register — and it will always be scarce and expensive relative to volume, because a terrace at 500 metres in an Alpine valley cannot be farmed any other way.

Two Alpine Ends of Piedmont Valli Ossolane in the north-east and Valsusa in the west are the region’s two genuinely Alpine denominations, and they share both a predicament and a permitted-variety list. Between them they make a few hundred thousand bottles and preserve a set of mountain grapes that exist nowhere else.

At the Table Ossolano cooking: gnocchi all’ossolana, violino of cured goat, polenta, mountain toma and Bettelmatt cheese, and chestnuts. Serve at 15–16°C.

Benchmark Producers Cantine Garrone at Domodossola and Cà da l’Era.