Valsusa DOC

Alpine viticulture on the road to France. The Val di Susa runs west from Turin to the Mont Cenis pass, and its denomination — approved on 31 October 1997 and covering nineteen communes — makes around eighty thousand bottles a year in total. It is one of the smallest and strangest wine zones in Piedmont.

The Terroir The registered file makes a single, striking claim. The valley runs east to west and enjoys a precious microclimate sheltered from the cold winds of the north, creating the conditions to grow vines above 850 metres of altitude — a condition unique in Piedmont. An east-west Alpine valley gives its southern flank full sun all day; that, and the shelter, is the whole reason viticulture exists this high in the western Alps.

The History For the communities of Chiomonte and Giaglione, the file says, the vine has always been an important source of income, with intense commercial exchange with France and with the nearby city of Turin. That is the valley’s condition in one sentence: a corridor, trading in both directions, with a viticulture tied to tradition for geological and human reasons but constantly renewing itself.

Grape Varieties This is the point of Valsusa. Avanà leads — a pale, high-acid Alpine red also found across the border in the Maurienne — joined by Becuet, Neretta Cuneese, Avarengo and Chatus, with Barbera, Dolcetto and Freisa in support. There is also a white, Baratuciat, recovered from near-extinction in the 2000s. Several of these varieties are grown essentially nowhere else on earth.

The Critical Take Valsusa is a genetic reserve that happens to make wine. The reds are pale, sharp and lightly tannic — the file describes ruby sometimes with orange reflections, dry, harmonious, acidulous, moderately tannic — and nobody would rank them against the Langhe. That is not the point. Avanà and Baratuciat are varieties that would have vanished within a generation without this denomination, and the terraces they grow on are being rebuilt by people who moved back to a valley most people left. At eighty thousand bottles the whole appellation produces less than one mid-sized Barolo estate.

The Terraces The vineyards above Chiomonte are cut into a steep south-facing slope at 700 to 900 metres, walled in dry stone, worked entirely by hand and reachable in places only on foot. Rebuilding them is the actual product; the wine is what pays for it, barely.

At the Table Alpine and Occitan cooking: polenta, cajettes, salted pork, game, mountain toma, and chestnuts. Serve cool, 14–15°C — these are not wines to warm.

Benchmark Producers Casa Ronsil and ’L Garbin at Chiomonte, Martina at Giaglione, and Occitania at Mattie.