What Is Ghemme Wine?

The cellars in Ghemme smell different in October, when the harvest fog settles on the moraine and the whole town goes quiet except for the sound of Nebbiolo being crushed. My father brought me here when I was nine, to visit a cousin of a cousin who kept a few rows of Spanna on the slope behind his house. I remember the pebbles. Granite, grey and pink, scattered across the vineyard floor like someone had emptied a riverbed onto a hillside. I picked one up and it was warm from the sun and gritty with mica. I still have it in a bowl on my desk in Lyon, next to volume four of my tasting journal. I think of it every time I open a bottle from this appellation.

Ghemme is not a place that announces itself. There is no grand entrance, no castle on a hill, no tour buses idling outside a tasting room. The town sits in the Alto Piemonte between the Po plain and the first real foothills of the Alps, closer to Milan than to Alba, closer to rice paddies than to the famous slopes of the Langhe. The nearest city of consequence is Novara. The nearest wine tourist is usually looking for Barolo and has taken a wrong turn. And yet this is one of the oldest documented Nebbiolo appellations in Piedmont, a place that was producing wine for the Dukes of Savoy and the papal court before anyone had thought to put the word "Barolo" on a label.

There is something about Ghemme that resists the language we use for its southern cousins. If Barolo is an opera, all structure and drama and orchestral tannin, Ghemme is a string quartet playing in a stone room: transparent, mineral, precise, and quietly devastating if you listen closely enough.

On the Moraine

Everything in Ghemme begins with ice. Ten thousand years ago, the Monte Rosa glacier retreated northward and left behind a thick layer of debris: granite pebbles, schist, crushed Fenera dolomite, sandstone, gneiss. This is moraine soil, and it is nothing like the calcareous clay marls of Barolo. Walk through a vineyard in the Langhe and your boots sink into dense, blue-gray clay that holds water like a sponge. Walk through Ghemme and you are crunching gravel, kicking loose stones, feeling the ground drain beneath you almost before the rain has stopped falling.

The vines here have to work for their water. Roots push deep through the porous substrate, threading between rocks, searching for moisture in the fractured granite below. What they find there, that mineral signature of cold stone and ancient ice, comes through in the glass with a clarity that no amount of winemaking technique can manufacture. There is a saline, almost flinty quality to good Ghemme that I have never encountered in any Nebbiolo from the south. It tastes, if you will forgive the fancy, like the ghost of a glacier.

Alberto Arlunno of Cantalupo, whose family has been farming these soils since the 1500s, once told me that his grandfather never compared Ghemme to Barolo because the comparison would not have occurred to him. They were simply different wines from different ground. The Langhe had their clay; the Alto Piemonte had its moraine. Each produced Nebbiolo that tasted like the place it came from. The idea that one was a lesser version of the other is a modern invention, born of marketing, not of terroir.

The Grape They Call Spanna

In the Alto Piemonte, nobody calls it Nebbiolo. The word here is Spanna, an old Piedmontese dialect name that predates the formal classification of Italian grape varieties by centuries. Genetically, Spanna is identical to the Nebbiolo Lampia that grows in Barolo. But centuries of adaptation to this cooler, higher-altitude landscape have given it subtle differences in behavior: it buds a little earlier, its skins are marginally thicker, and the color it produces in the glass is more transparent, more garnet than ruby, with an orange rim that arrives sooner than you expect.

The DOCG regulations allow producers to blend in up to 15% Vespolina and Uva Rara, two local varieties that can add aromatic lift or soften tannin. Some estates use this allowance. The best do not. Cantalupo vinifies 100% Spanna across every bottling, from the entry-level Ghemme to the single-vineyard Collis Breclemae, on the principle that blending dilutes the voice of the moraine. Having tasted both approaches side by side on more than one October evening in their cellar, I am inclined to agree.

A History Longer Than Memory

There is a tendency, when talking about Piedmontese Nebbiolo, to begin and end with the Langhe. But the historical record tells a different story. Nebbiolo was cultivated in the Alto Piemonte during the medieval period, and by the Renaissance, wines from the hills around Novara were among the most sought-after in northern Italy. The Dukes of Savoy kept Ghemme on their tables. Papal courts imported it. In the nineteenth century, when Italian wine writers compiled their hierarchies, they placed Ghemme alongside the wines of Barolo, not beneath them.

Then the twentieth century happened. Phylloxera arrived. Two world wars emptied the countryside. The young left for Turin and Milan, and the vineyards, which had never been easy to farm, went to scrub. The Langhe recovered faster, had better cooperative infrastructure, was closer to major markets, and captured the international imagination. By the 1970s, Ghemme had all but disappeared from the conversation.

What saved it was stubbornness. A handful of families refused to walk away. Carlo Arlunno replanted for quality in 1969 and formally established Antichi Vigneti di Cantalupo on the third of May, 1977. His son Alberto, who trained in agriculture and enology, released the estate's first bottled Ghemme from the 1974 vintage. Now Alberto's daughter Benedetta is the incoming fourth generation, and the estate produces four distinct crus from 34 hectares of moraine vineyard, including the Collis Breclemae that Antonio Galloni scored 98 points and called one of the finest wines in the appellation.

At the Table

I have been thinking about Ghemme as a food wine for as long as I have been drinking it, which is to say since my father opened a bottle at a family dinner outside Novara when I was nineteen and old enough to understand what I was tasting. He paired it with a slow-braised rabbit that his aunt had made with rosemary and white wine, and the way the wine's acidity cut through the richness of the braise, the way the mineral finish reset the palate between bites, told me everything I needed to know about what this appellation could do at a table.

Ghemme belongs with food that has depth but not heaviness. Porcini risotto in the autumn. Braised rabbit or guinea fowl in the winter. Aged Gorgonzola naturale with a drizzle of chestnut honey. Tajarin with butter and sage. It is a wine that works beautifully by the glass precisely because its tannins are fine enough and its acidity high enough to pair with a wider range of dishes than most Nebbiolo. A sommelier can pour it alongside a mushroom risotto at the start of the evening and a braised meat course at the end, and it will be the right wine both times.

The appellation remains small, fewer than a dozen serious producers, and total production is a fraction of what the Langhe generates. There is no industrial Ghemme, no bulk Spanna, no brand-recognition premium inflating the price. For the moment, this is still a wine that disappears from allocation lists before most buyers know it exists, sourced by the kind of sommelier who reads the small print on an import sheet and recognizes the name of a grape before the name of a region.

If you have not poured Ghemme yet, start with the Cantalupo. Open it on a cool evening with something braised. Give it an hour in a decanter if you can, though it will not punish you if you cannot. And pay attention to the finish, that long, saline, mineral thread that lingers after the fruit has faded. That is the moraine talking. That is ten thousand years of glacier, pressed into a glass.