Uva Rara: The Rare Grape That Softens Alto Piemonte

The old grower walked me to the far corner of his vineyard above Ghemme, where the rows tangle and lean and refuse the tidy geometry of a modern planting, and he stopped at a vine I did not recognize. Spanna was everywhere around us, the noble Nebbiolo that gives these hills their reputation, but this was something else: looser bunches, fewer berries, grapes spaced apart on the stem as though a careless hand had plucked half of them off before they ripened. "Uva rara," he said, and rolled a single berry between his fingers. The rare grape. I assumed, that first season, that the name meant the vine was scarce. I was wrong, and the correction is the whole reason this grape is worth a thousand words.

Uva Rara does not mean rare in the sense of uncommon. It means rare in the older, almost forgotten sense of sparse, thinned out, loosely spaced. The name describes the bunch, not the planting. The berries sit far apart on the cluster, leaving gaps a fingertip wide, and that airy architecture is the grape's whole personality printed in miniature. Sparse fruit means good air circulation, less rot in a damp Alto Piemonte autumn, and a gentle, unhurried ripening. The vine is not rare at all. It has grown in the Novara hills for centuries, quietly, in the shadow of a more famous neighbor.

Here in the hills between Novara and Vercelli, where the Alps begin to show themselves on a clear morning and the rice paddies of the plain glint to the south, the locals have another name for it. They call it Bonarda Novarese, the Bonarda of Novara. And that name, lovely as it is, has caused more confusion in wine literature than almost any other synonym in Piedmont.

Untangling the Bonarda Knot

Let me be plain about this, because the muddle is genuine and it trips up even careful writers. Uva Rara is called Bonarda Novarese locally. But it is not Croatina. This matters enormously. Croatina is the grape that stands behind most of the wines labeled simply "Bonarda" in the Oltrepo Pavese, and behind the frothy, semi-sparkling Bonarda you find on trattoria tables across Lombardy and southern Piedmont. When someone hands you a glass of purple, fizzy "Bonarda" and tells you it is light and grapey, that is almost always Croatina. It is not this grape.

Nor is Uva Rara the same as the other Bonardas scattered through Piedmont's naming history, including the variety the Italians have formally registered as Bonarda Piemontese, which is yet another distinct grape grown mostly around Turin and the Monferrato. Three different vines, one borrowed name, generations of crossed wires. The word "Bonarda" in Italy is less a grape than a coat hook on which several unrelated varieties have hung their hat.

So hold these apart in your mind. Croatina is the fizzy purple Bonarda of the Oltrepo. Bonarda Piemontese is its own thing near Turin. And Uva Rara, the loosely-clustered grape of the Novara hills, is Bonarda Novarese and nothing else. If you remember only one fact from this piece, make it this: in Alto Piemonte, Bonarda means Uva Rara, and Uva Rara is not Croatina.

A Supporting Role, Played Quietly

Uva Rara almost never leads a wine. You will rarely find a bottle that announces it on the front label, and the few varietal versions that exist are curiosities more than statements. This is not a failure of the grape. It is its purpose. Uva Rara was bred by tradition, if not by intention, to be a blending partner, and specifically to soften the austere, mineral, sometimes forbidding Spanna of these hills.

The appellation rules of Alto Piemonte recognize this. Uva Rara is a permitted blending grape in the great Spanna-based Ghemme wines and in their siblings up and down the Novara and Vercelli slopes: Boca, Fara, Sizzano, and the wider family of Nebbiolo appellations including Gattinara. The percentages allowed are modest, usually a small minority of the blend, but the effect is real. Where Spanna brings tannin, structure, garnet transparency and a long saline finish, Uva Rara brings flesh. It rounds the edges. It fills the gap in the mid-palate where young Spanna can feel taut and unforgiving.

If you want to understand why this region blends at all, it helps to taste a great deal of Alto Piemonte Nebbiolo side by side, as I have been doing this season. The northern Nebbiolo is leaner and more nervy than its cousins in the Langhe, more vertical, more mineral. A small dose of Uva Rara is the velvet glove over that iron hand. It does not change what the wine is. It makes the wine easier to live with in its youth.

In the Cantalupo Cellar

I spent a long afternoon this season in the cellar at Cantalupo, where Spanna is unquestionably king and Uva Rara plays its quiet supporting role. The estate is a purist's house, and its flagship bottlings lean hard on pure Nebbiolo, but the grape's logic was everywhere in the conversation. Alberto talked about Uva Rara the way a good chef talks about salt: not the star of the dish, never noticed when it is right, sorely missed when it is absent. A touch of it in the right vintage takes the angular adolescence off a young wine and lets the fruit speak a season sooner.

Tasting the Cantalupo Ghemme 2016 beside a barrel sample with a little Uva Rara worked into it was the clearest lesson I have had in what this grape does. The pure Spanna was magnificent and severe, all stone and red currant and that ghost-of-a-glacier minerality the moraine soils give. The blended sample was rounder, friendlier, its tannins softened into suede. Neither was better. They were two different conversations, and Uva Rara was the one doing the diplomatic work.

Why the Growers Keep It

There is a temptation, in an age that worships single-varietal purity, to dismiss a grape like Uva Rara as a relic, a hedge from the days when field blends were a survival strategy rather than a stylistic choice. The growers of the Novara hills know better. Uva Rara earns its rows. Its loose clusters resist the rot that threatens a wet northern harvest. It ripens reliably in a cool climate where Nebbiolo can struggle. And it gives the winemaker a lever to pull, a way to dial back the severity of a hard vintage without resorting to oak or extraction tricks.

This is alpine winemaking, after all, and the logic of these hills is the logic of the mountains rising behind them: take what the high, cool ground gives you, and blend for balance rather than force. The story of alpine Nebbiolo on the rise is, in part, the story of growers rediscovering the supporting players that made these wines drinkable for centuries. Uva Rara is one of those players. So is Vespolina, its aromatic cousin, but that is a tale for another card.

For drinkers coming to this region from the south, weaned on the grand wines of the Langhe, the Alto Piemonte can feel like a parallel universe where everything is familiar and nothing is quite the same. If you have been hunting for wines similar to Barolo but lighter on their feet, the answer often lies in these blended northern Nebbiolos, and the reason they wear their structure so gracefully is, in no small part, this loosely-clustered grape with the misleading name.

Uva Rara will probably never be famous. It does not want to be. It is content to do its work in the second chair, sparse-bunched and easygoing, taking the hard edges off a noble neighbor and asking for no credit in return. The next time you open a Ghemme or a Boca or a Sizzano and find it softer than you expected, friendlier than its reputation, gentler in the glass than the moraine soil would suggest, raise it quietly to the rare grape. The rare grape that is not rare at all, and never leads, and is somehow indispensable.