A class held at Eataly Vino, a wine shop in Flatiron from Eataly, a market that encompasses the history and food culture of Italy, on Wednesday, April 24.
FERDINANDO PRINCIPIANO, freisa, ‘Langhe Freisa’ MONFORTE d’ALBA [buy it]
child of nebbiolo from an old-school Barolo grower in the one village in Barolo not given overwhelmingly over to grape growing
FABRIZIO IULI, grignolino, ‘Natalin’ MONTALDO di CERRINA MONFERRATO [buy it]
many-seeded, once-celebrated Savoyard favorite hiding in the remotest hills of Monferrato, from a devotee of forgotten grapes
NADIA VERRUA, ruché, ‘Teresa La Grande’ MONFERRATO [buy it]
named for her grandmother, aged an extra year in grand vintages
DANIELE RICCI, timorasso, ‘San Leto’ TORTONA [buy it]
an intense, textural white grape almost lost to phylloxera (cortese was easier to grow), making a small comeback from the brink of extinction
What does drinking through, or thinking about, a region beyond its most prestige-coded, revered cultivar get you?
(This is a specific form of a more general question: What do you get when you approach wine through a lens that’s not What’s the ‘best’ wine?)
Maybe it’s a way to taste blue-chip producers that would otherwise be out of reach.
Maybe it’s a way to satisfy a certain degree of curiosity, of fascination with the scarce and overlooked.
Maybe it offers a way to understand both region and cultivar a little better, by prying them ever so slightly apart.
Maybe, most importantly—in terms of how we decide to collectively value and consider these things—it’s because cultivating a single variety of a single plant in monoculture spells doom for a landscape, and if that’s what we choose to celebrate, we’re celebrating cataclysm.
Piemonte is home to a tangled profusion of grapes that grow nowhere else, many of them part of the same sprawling extended family — everything from violet-perfumed ruché and many-seeded grignolino to fizzy brachetto and peppery pelaverga.
There are varieties that are almost extinct, like slarina or baratuciat or nascetta, and varieties that have been rescued from extinction and are catching on, like timorasso in Tortona.
(There are even, hidden in the deep past, the truly obscure or no longer cultivated vines that gave birth to these varieties: moissan, parent to dolcetto; molvasia aromatica di Parma, mother to ruché; and the nameless genotypes that we can reconstruct from DNA sequencing, showing, for example, that grignolino’s unknown parent were themselves a child of nebbiolo and bottogera.)
From a certain point of view, all of this is hopelessly inefficient.
From mine, it’s the delight that pulled me into wine in the first place.
Children's Atlas of Wine 