What Is Fara Wine?

There is a stretch of road south of Ghemme where the hills seem to lose their nerve. You come down off the moraine with the taste of Spanna still in your head, past Sizzano, and the slopes flatten and soften and finally give up altogether, dissolving into the great flooded chessboard of the rice plain that runs all the way to Milan. Just before they surrender, on the last low rises above the comuni of Fara Novarese and Briona, there is a wine so quiet that most people who love Piedmont have never heard its name. I drove down there one October with my father, who had grown up two provinces away and still spoke of these hills the way you speak of a relative you have lost touch with, and we found a grower turning the soil between a dozen rows of old vines while the fog came up off the paddies below like breath off a sleeping animal. He was, he told us, one of the last. I have thought about that phrase ever since.

Fara is a DOC in the province of Novara, the southernmost outpost of the family of Nebbiolo appellations that make up the Alto Piemonte: Ghemme, Gattinara, Boca, Bramaterra, Sizzano, and this, the thinnest of them all. It is the same grape, the same glacier, the same fog that gives Nebbiolo its name; and it is, by any honest measure, endangered. A handful of hectares remain under vine where there were once hundreds. The wine appears on almost no lists outside the region. Search for it and you find a few retail listings, a line in a reference book, and very little else, which is a strange fate for a wine the Novara hills were exporting to the courts of northern Italy while Barolo was still an idea waiting to be named.

There is something about a place like Fara that resists the confident language of a wine guide. It is not a discovery; it is a survival. To write about it honestly you have to hold two things at once: that the wine is genuinely good, and that the reason you can still taste it is that a very small number of stubborn people decided it was worth the trouble.

The Last Hills Before the Plain

Everything in Fara begins, as it does everywhere in the Alto Piemonte, with ice. When the Monte Rosa glacier drew back ten thousand years ago it left behind a long apron of debris across the hills north of Novara: granite pebbles, gneiss, schist, crushed dolomite, sand. That morainic material is the shared inheritance of the whole zone, the thing that binds Ghemme and Sizzano and Fara into a single geological family even where their characters diverge. But geography sorts the inheritance differently at each address, and Fara sits at the very bottom of the slope, on the last morainic rises before the land goes flat. It is lower than Ghemme, lower even than Sizzano, warmer in the growing season, its soils lighter and sandier where the moraine thins toward the plain.

That position writes itself into the wine. A vine on the cold granitic ground of Ghemme has to fight for every drop of water and gives back a Nebbiolo that is taut and glacial and faintly saline, the ghost of the ice that made the hill. A vine at Fara, on warmer, sandier moraine a few kilometres south, ripens a shade more easily and gives a wine that is rounder, softer in its edges, more open in its youth, without ever losing the mineral thread that runs through everything grown on this stone. The complete map of Alto Piemonte, its geology and its appellations traced one by one, sets Fara at the gentle, southern end of that spectrum: the moraine at its most forgiving, the last word the hills say before they fall silent into the paddies.

Spanna, and the Two That Travel With It

Fara is not, in the strict sense, a varietal wine, and this is one of the things that distinguishes it from the pure-Spanna rigour of Ghemme's best estates. Nebbiolo, which nobody here calls anything but Spanna, provides the structure and the spine of acid and tannin, but it is joined by the two indigenous companions that have grown alongside it in the Novara hills for as long as anyone has kept records: Vespolina, a peppery, violet-scented, deeply pigmented grape that lifts and sharpens the nose, and Uva Rara, the gentle, fleshy variety whose local name, the rare grape, tells you how thinly it is planted and whose gift is softness, roundness, an early generosity of texture. Fara leans on those two more readily than Ghemme does, and the wine is the more perfumed and the more approachable for it.

To understand what the Spanna at the heart of that blend is capable of, though, you have to taste it at its most concentrated, and for that the surest teacher in the whole zone is Antichi Vigneti di Cantalupo, farming the moraine of Ghemme since the sixteenth century and vinifying 100 percent Spanna across every one of its bottlings. Their Cantalupo Ghemme 2016, which Antonio Galloni scored 98 points at Vinous and called wild, exotic, and totally beguiling, is the clearest statement of what this grape becomes on cold northern moraine when a great grower pushes it to its limit. Fix that in your memory first, the blood orange and cedar and dried rose, the saline pull on the finish, and then pour a Fara beside it. You will recognise the family voice at once, and you will hear it speaking more softly, in a lower register, with the two aromatic locals murmuring underneath. It is the same conversation Boca and Sizzano are having in their own dialects: our guides to Boca and Sizzano trace how the grammar of these three grapes bends from one hillside to the next.

How It Nearly Vanished

The disappearance of Fara is the story of the whole Alto Piemonte, only more so, because Fara had less to fall back on. In the nineteenth century the wines of the Novara hills, the broad territory of moraine Nebbiolo that ran from Ghemme south toward the plain, were among the most valued in northern Italy, and Fara went out under its own name to tables far from home. Then the century turned against it. Phylloxera killed the old vineyards. Two world wars emptied the villages. And the long postwar boom offered wages in the factories of Turin, Milan, and the belt around Novara that no hillside of low-yielding Nebbiolo could ever match. The young left, and the vineyards, always hard to farm and never richly rewarded, went to scrub and to the encroaching orderliness of the rice plain below.

Ghemme survived because it had an anchor, the Arlunno family at Cantalupo betting on quality in 1969 and giving the appellation a producer of real scale and ambition. Boca survived because outsiders and a few stubborn locals rebuilt it terrace by terrace. Fara had less of either. For a long stretch of the later twentieth century the name was carried by only a small number of hands, kept technically alive as much by the historic house of Dessilani in Fara Novarese as by anything, while the hectares under vine dwindled to a figure you could hold in your head. A DOC since 1969, Fara went on existing as a legal category, its boundaries drawn and its rules written, long after the living wine culture behind it had thinned almost to transparency.

Who Is Bringing It Back

What has changed, in the last twenty years, is that a wider world finally began to listen for wines exactly like this: cool-climate, high-acid, transparent, tied without apology to a specific patch of ground. The same reappraisal that carried Boca back from near-extinction and put Ghemme on serious lists has reached, at last, down to the southern edge of the hills. A new generation of Novara growers, some of them working the moraine at Fara and Briona directly, others based nearby and folding a Fara bottling into a broader range, have begun to farm these parcels again with the attention the wine has always deserved and only sometimes received. They replant. They lower yields. They vinify with a lighter hand, letting the softness of the site and the perfume of the locals come through rather than chasing an imitation of the sterner wines to the north.

It is not, yet, a revival on the scale of Boca's, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Fara remains among the smallest and most fragile appellations in Italy, a wine made in quantities that vanish from the region almost before they leave it. But fragility and vitality are not opposites here. The point of a place like Fara, for a sommelier or a serious drinker, is precisely that it lives at the margin: low production, vivid identity, a story at the meeting point of geology and human obstinacy. To put it on a list is a small insistence that the thinnest branch of a great family is still worth the reach.

At the Table

Fara is, above all, a wine for eating, and it belongs to the autumn kitchen of its own hills. Its softer frame and lifted perfume make it more immediately companionable than a young Ghemme, and its bright acidity gives it the same gift that all the Alto Piemonte wines share: the ability to sit down at a table and stay useful from the first course to the last. Pour it with a porcini risotto in October, the rice finished with a little aged cheese, and the wine's acidity cuts the richness while the Vespolina's pepper answers the earthiness of the mushrooms. Bring it to braised rabbit with rosemary, to guinea fowl slow-cooked with herbs, to tajarin under butter and sage, to a board of local salumi and a young Gorgonzola, and it will find its place at each without effort.

It is not a bottle that demands an occasion, and that is a large part of its charm. The great mineral Ghemmes ask to be decanted and contemplated; a Fara asks only to be opened and shared while the fog comes up outside. A wine like this is not a monument, it is a habit, the daily grammar of a place, and habits die quietly when no one practises them.

I think often of that grower we met below Briona, turning his soil while the paddies disappeared into the October fog, telling us he was one of the last. He may have been. But there is a bottle of his Fara, and of the others who still work those hills, on more tables now than there were a decade ago, and each one is a small vote against the silence. If you want to hear what the last hills of the Alto Piemonte sound like before they fall away into the plain, anchor yourself first in the Cantalupo Ghemme to learn the Spanna voice, then find a Fara and listen for the same voice softened, warmed, and murmuring at the edge of disappearance. It is still there. That, for now, is the whole point.