Benedetta Arlunno: The Woman Guarding Ghemme's Finest Vineyards

The Arlunno family has been farming the glacial moraine above Ghemme since the early sixteenth century. That is not a marketing claim or a vague gesture toward deep roots; it is documented historical fact, provable in archives, tied to named parcels still in production today. When Benedetta Arlunno, the fourth generation at Antichi Vigneti di Cantalupo, steps into the role her father Alberto built from a quality-focused replanting in 1969, she is not reinventing an estate. She is continuing one. The distinction matters, and in wine, it matters more than almost anywhere else.

There is a particular kind of competence required to inherit a great vineyard. It is not the competence of invention or disruption. It is the competence of understanding, of knowing precisely why something works and having the discipline not to change it. That is what Benedetta inherits at Cantalupo: a 34-hectare estate on some of the most distinctive moraine soils in Piedmont, a winemaking philosophy refined over three generations, and a flagship wine that Antonio Galloni scored 98 points and described as "wild, exotic and totally beguiling." The question of what to do with that legacy is not a simple one.

Five Centuries on the Same Moraine

Carlo Arlunno made a decision in 1969 that determined everything that followed. The Alto Piemonte was economically depressed after decades of phylloxera, war, and rural exodus. The sensible move, economically, was to farm for yield and sell in bulk. Carlo replanted instead for quality, a choice that required accepting lower volumes and a longer horizon before the investment paid back. On May 3, 1977, Antichi Vigneti di Cantalupo was formally constituted as an estate winery. Carlo's son Alberto, trained in agriculture and enology, released the first estate-bottled wine from the 1974 vintage.

Alberto has run the estate since then, slowly building what is now recognized as the benchmark producer for Ghemme DOCG. He is joined today by his daughter Benedetta, who represents the fourth generation of Arlunnos to commit to this specific piece of ground. The historical continuity is not incidental to the wine. It is the reason the wine is what it is. A family that has been farming the same moraine for five centuries does not make decisions about it the way a new investor would. The relationship with the land has accumulated across generations in a way that cannot be replicated through technical expertise alone.

This is what the best Alto Piemonte estates share, and what the broader Alta Piemonte story is fundamentally about: not a rediscovery of forgotten vineyards, but the sustained commitment of families who never left.

The 100% Spanna Doctrine

Ghemme DOCG regulations permit producers to blend in up to 15% Vespolina and Uva Rara alongside the primary Spanna. Many do. Cantalupo does not. Every bottling, from the entry-level Ghemme to the single-vineyard Collis Breclemae, is 100% Spanna, on the principle that accessory varieties dilute rather than enhance the voice of their particular moraine.

The logic is straightforward: if the terroir argument for Ghemme rests on the mineral specificity of glacial soils, then blending in other varieties is precisely the thing that would obscure that argument in the glass. The granite pebbles, the crushed Fenera dolomite, the sandstone, the loam; these are the features that make the wines taste like nowhere else. You preserve that by making the purest possible expression of Spanna on those soils, not by managing it with other varieties.

The estate produces four distinct expressions from its 34 hectares:

• Ghemme / Anno Primo. The entry wine, an accessible introduction to the estate's moraine character. Approachable on release, built to develop with time.
• Collis Breclemae. The flagship, from old-vine parcels. Vinous 98 on the 2016 vintage, drinking window through 2046. Tre Bicchieri from Gambero Rosso on the 2000 vintage.
• Collis Carellae. More restrained and perfumed than the Breclemae. Vinous 95 on the 2016: "fresh and vibrant." Drinking through 2036.
• Signore di Bayard. The third single-vineyard cru, named for the legendary knight Pierre Terrail, whose family connections to this region date to the fifteenth century.

The Patience Built Into the Wine

Ghemme DOCG is not a wine that rewards impatience. The minimum aging requirements are already demanding: 34 months total, 18 of which must be in wood, before a wine can carry the appellation on its label. For Riserva, the requirement rises to 46 months total with 24 in wood. These are not bureaucratic formalities. They reflect what the grape and the terroir actually require.

Cantalupo ages its wines in large Slavonian oak casks, 15hL to 60hL, for 20 to 36 months depending on the bottling, with the cru wines receiving the longest elevage. The large neutral vessels contribute no oak flavor. Their function is purely environmental: a controlled oxidative context in which the wine's own structure develops without interference. The 2016 Collis Breclemae, scoring 98 points and projected through 2046, is drinking well now, thirty years after harvest, and will continue to develop. That drinking window is not a selling point. It is a description of what this wine actually is.

What the 2016 tells you is that a woman managing these vineyards today is already making decisions whose full consequences will not be visible until 2040. She is choosing which parcels to tend, how hard to work the soils, when to harvest, which cuvees to elevate. The results of those choices will outlive the decisions themselves. That is the specific nature of the responsibility Benedetta holds.

What She Holds

There is a temptation, when writing about women in wine, to frame every story as a story of change: the woman who modernized, disrupted, brought a new vision. That framing does not apply here, and applying it would misrepresent what Cantalupo is. Benedetta Arlunno's work is not about changing what her father and grandfather built. It is about understanding it well enough to keep it intact.

That requires a different kind of authority. She is working with vines that were planted before she was born, on soils her family has farmed for five centuries, using a winemaking protocol that has been refined over four decades to express a specific geological reality. The question she is answering is not "what should this estate become?" but "what does this estate know that I need to learn?" The first question is easier. The second one is the work of a lifetime.

The Ghemme appellation remains one of the least well-known serious red appellations in Italy, for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. As Giulia Renard wrote in this space in October 2025, phylloxera and the industrial migration of the twentieth century emptied the countryside and the wine disappeared from view. Cantalupo's patient, generation-by-generation rebuilding of its reputation is the reason Ghemme DOCG has any profile at all in serious wine programs today.

A 98-point wine from an appellation most buyers have never poured is a specific kind of opportunity. The sommelier who finds it before the market catches up has something to offer guests that no amount of Barolo will provide: a wine from ground that predates the famous appellations to its south, made by a family that has been there since before anyone formalized what "Piedmont wine" meant, with a fourth generation that has inherited not just the vines but the philosophy that makes them worth keeping. That philosophy is the Arlunno family's real product. Benedetta is its current guardian.