The Alto Piemonte Renaissance: Why Ghemme Is Having a Moment

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Conversations on Italian wine.

Ninety-eight points.

Galloni.

Galloni. For a Ghemme.

For a Ghemme. Not Barolo. Not Barbaresco.

Cantalupo's Collis Breclemae, the 2016. Ninety-eight.

My father's family is from Novara.

Right, I forgot that.

I grew up drinking the wine before I knew what it was. My grandmother just put it on the table.

And nobody was writing ninety-eight on it then.

(light laugh) Nobody was writing anything on it. It was just the wine.

That's the whole story, actually.

Mm.

That tension - between a wine that has always been serious and a world that only just noticed - that's what I want to dig into today.

The other Piedmont.

Exactly. The Piedmont that nearly wasn't.

So. Where are we, geographically. Alto Piemonte - and it's worth actually placing this, because people don't.

They assume it's just... north of Barolo.

North of Barolo by about a hundred and thirty kilometers. It's a completely different part of the region.

That's not a small distance.

You're sitting at the foot of the Alps - Monte Rosa is right there - and you have the Po Valley to the south. So you get this very specific compression of cool alpine air and lowland humidity.

The fog is different up there.

Different fog season, different timing. The Langhe gets nebbia in autumn - that's the word, right, nebbia, fog, same root as Nebbiolo.

Same root, different fog.

In Alto Piemonte the alpine influence makes the seasons sharper. Warmer days, colder nights. That's important for the aromatics - we'll come back to that.

And the denominazioni up there - it's not just Ghemme.

No, there's a whole arc. Gattinara, Ghemme, Boca, Bramaterra, Lessona - and then if you keep going west, Carema at the Valle d'Aosta border. Each one its own DOCG or DOC.

Gattinara is probably the most well-known of that group.

Gattinara has Travaglini, which is the name that travels. Ghemme has been quieter.

Until now.

Until now. And the reason this region had such a quiet century - that's the part that matters. Because it wasn't always quiet.

The industrial flight.

Nineteen-sixties, seventies. FIAT opens plants in Turin. Olivetti is expanding - Ivrea is right there, practically in the zone. Suddenly every young person with calloused hands has an alternative.

A paycheck and an apartment.

Right. And hillside viticulture is hard. It doesn't compete well with factory wages. So the vineyards just... stopped being tended.

The terraces went back to forest.

Literally. You can still see it - old vine rows absorbed into undergrowth. It's visible on the hillsides.

I've seen it. Driving up from Novara, there are these - you can make out the old rows through the trees.

And the appellations that were established - Gattinara got its DOC in 1967, Ghemme got DOCG status in 1997 - they were working against this tide of abandonment the whole time.

Codifying something that was already half gone.

Precisely. And then - slowly, starting in the early two-thousands - people start coming back. Not many. But the ones who did were serious.

So. A region that almost ceased to exist as a wine region. And now Galloni is giving it ninety-eight.

Yeah.

Now. The terroir question. Because this is where I think most people who know Barolo or Barbaresco genuinely get surprised.

Tell me what you mean.

The Langhe - Barolo, Barbaresco - it's fundamentally calcareous marl. Tufa, limestone, compacted clay. That's the terroir that makes Barolo what it is. The tannin structure, the way it ages.

Right.

Alto Piemonte is glacial moraine. Completely different formation - remnants from the last ice age, when the Alpine glaciers retreated. What they left behind is this mixture of porphyry, granite, quartz, volcanic rock, all broken down and deposited. Sandy. Porous.

There is something about the drainage.

Extreme drainage. Nebbiolo hates wet feet. Up there it's never going to drown - the water moves through.

And the porphyry - that's the volcanic component.

Red porphyry, specifically. It's in the rock faces, in the soil matrix. Contributes a kind of minerality you don't get from limestone soils. Harder to pin down, actually - it's not the chalky freshness you get from Champagne or Chablis, it's something more ferrous.

Mm, I think about iron. When I taste these wines there's something - not metallic exactly. More like the smell of wet stone.

The iron oxide content in those glacial deposits is significant. That's not imaginary.

Good. Because sometimes I taste something and then I'm not sure if I tasted it or told myself I tasted it.

(light laugh) Well. The geology supports you on this one.

Good. Okay. So compared to Barolo - for someone who knows Barolo well?

The short version is: less body, more transparency.

More transparency. Say more.

Barolo can be opaque in its youth. Dense. The tannin structure on a young Barolo can feel like a wall. These Alto Piemonte Nebbiolos are - they're more permeable. You can see through them earlier. The fruit isn't hidden behind architecture the same way.

The tannins are different.

Silkier. Still grippy in youth - this is still Nebbiolo, it's going to give you tannin - but they integrate differently. In sandy soils Nebbiolo tends toward finer grain tannin. The marl in Langhe builds more aggressive phenolic structure.

So you can drink them younger.

Some of them, yes. The entry-level Ghemme or Boca - you can approach those at five or six years. A Breclemae 2016 is still unfolding, but it's not shut down the way a young Serralunga Barolo would be.

And the aromatics. Because when my grandmother poured this wine - I didn't know what I was smelling but I remember it.

What do you remember?

Rose. But dried rose. And something - tar, a little, and a kind of... forest floor. Not mushroom exactly. More like after rain.

That's Nebbiolo. You described Nebbiolo perfectly.

(light laugh) I described it without knowing what it was.

Which is maybe the purest form of tasting.

Do the Alto Piemonte wines have more of that floral quality? Or less?

More - or at least more accessible earlier. The altitude and the cooler temperatures slow the ripening, and Nebbiolo that ripens slowly tends to hold onto those perfumed top notes. The terpene compounds - geraniol, linalool. They volatilize if you push ripeness.

So warmer vintages would work against that.

It's a real risk as the climate shifts. The cool nights are what protect the aromatics. If the minimum temperatures creep up - we start to lose what makes these wines distinct.

The mountain is doing something the Langhe can't do.

Right now - yes. The question is how long that holds.

Mm.

Okay. One more thing on terroir before we go to Cantalupo specifically. The altitude variation across the zone is significant - you have parcels anywhere from one-fifty meters up to four hundred. That's not a small range.

And elevation is what changes the acid retention.

Acid and phenolic ripeness - the higher parcels can lag by two, sometimes three weeks in harvest timing. So you get these different maturation profiles within the same denomination. Some growers are making decisions that feel almost Burgundian in their parcel specificity.

Spanna. The name. Does it matter that they're still using it?

Hmm. I go back and forth on this.

On one hand - local identity, history -

On the other hand, Nebbiolo is a brand at this point. Saying Nebbiolo puts you in a conversation. Spanna puts you in a footnote.

That's unfortunate.

It is. But the DOCG regs allow both. Cantalupo uses Nebbiolo on the front label. Smart move commercially, I think.

Even though the soul of the thing is Spanna.

The soul is the soil. The name is just logistics.

Mm. I'm not sure I agree with that.

No?

Names carry... they carry belonging. When my uncle said Spanna he wasn't saying a grape variety. He was saying something about where he was from.

That's fair. That's a real thing.

Okay. Cantalupo.

Cantalupo.

I want to understand why this particular estate. Within the broader story you're telling about the region - why are they the ones who produced the wine that got the score?

The Arlunno family. They have documentation of farming these slopes going back to the fifteen hundreds. Five centuries on the same land.

Same land. Not the same winery - but the same family, same slopes.

The estate in its modern form really took shape mid-twentieth century. But the relationship to that land - the Arlunno family didn't leave. Through the industrial flight, through everything.

They stayed.

They stayed. While neighbors were selling or walking away. And the Collis Breclemae - that's the single-vineyard bottling - it comes from their oldest, highest-elevation parcels.

How high?

The Breclemae vineyard sits around two hundred and fifty to three hundred meters. Which sounds modest, but you're getting the full Monte Rosa exposure - cold nights, the diurnal swing is significant.

And the vines themselves - age?

Old. Cantalupo has some massale-selected plantings that go back decades, and the oldest parcels in Breclemae are the ones they reserved for this wine specifically. The yield is extremely low.

Low yield Nebbiolo on old vines in glacial moraine. You'd expect something concentrated.

Concentrated is one word. The other word is precise. Like - the flavors are densely packed but they're not heavy. There's no excess.

I tasted the 2016 at a dinner in Lyon two years ago.

Yeah?

Someone brought it. I didn't know what it was until after. And I remember thinking - this wine is very quiet.

Quiet.

Not subdued. Quiet like a person who is confident. It wasn't trying to get your attention. But everything was there, if you were paying attention.

What was the table eating?

Braised rabbit. Which - if you ever want to understand why this wine exists, put it next to braised rabbit.

The acidity and the iron thing do something with the fat.

The wine opens. It becomes more than it was on its own. I think that's the - that's the test, actually. A wine that improves with food is a wine that was made for a table.

And these wines were always table wines. In the sense that they were never made for the bottle alone.

Like my grandmother's table.

Exactly. Which matters when you're talking about a ninety-eight-point score - these aren't contemplative wines, made for cellaring and then drinking alone in front of a fireplace.

They want company.

They want food, they want noise, they want a long afternoon.

What does Cantalupo do with the wood? Because the wine I tasted - I didn't notice oak. I mean, I know it's there, but it wasn't a character.

Large Slavonian oak casks. Botti. Not barriques.

Ah. So slow oxidation, no flavor transfer.

The wood is furniture, not an ingredient. The botti are old - neutral wood. It's purely about micro-oxygenation and tannin integration. They're not trying to add anything.

Which is a statement of confidence in the fruit.

You have to believe the vineyard is enough. If it's not, barriques will cover it. If it is, botti let it speak.

Mm.

That description fits the aging regimen, actually. Ghemme DOCG requires minimum four years before release - at least three of those in wood.

Four years before release.

For a region that struggled to get on anyone's radar - they were requiring serious aging regimes before anyone was paying attention.

Making the wine as if it deserved to be taken seriously.

Before the world agreed.

And at the price. A wine like that - what would a comparable Barolo cost?

A single-vineyard Barolo from a respected estate in a great vintage - you're looking at four, five hundred dollars retail. More for the top names.

And the Breclemae.

A fraction of that. It's remarkable, and it's largely a function of the name recognition gap. The wine hasn't changed. Critical reception is catching up. The market just hasn't landed yet.

Which brings us back to ninety-eight points.

It does.

And I have thoughts.

I know you do.

The score is a blessing. For Cantalupo, for the Arlunno family - recognition after five hundred years of being overlooked. Obviously.

Right.

But. A ninety-eight-point score for a small, quiet region - it attracts attention the region may not be prepared for. And not all of that attention is good.

What kind of attention worries you.

Speculators. People who read ninety-eight and immediately start buying cases to resell. People who discover Ghemme as an investment, not as a wine.

Okay but - that happens to every great wine. You can't protect Ghemme from secondary market interest by keeping it obscure. That's not a sustainable argument.

I'm not saying obscure it. I'm saying there's a version of this story where the score changes prices before it changes infrastructure. The growers up there - many of them are still small, working with very limited production.

Cantalupo is not a tiny operation.

No. But Cantalupo getting ninety-eight raises expectations for the entire denomination. Suddenly every wine in a Ghemme bottle is being compared to a landmark score that one estate earned over five centuries. That's not fair to anyone.

Hm. That's actually a real risk.

The smaller producers - the ones who are part of the revival, who came back to farm their grandparents' land - they can't absorb that kind of expectation pressure.

But without the validation - without someone like Galloni saying 'this is serious wine' - those same small producers can't get distribution. They can't get shelf space. They can't get poured at a restaurant in New York or London.

Mm.

The score is a key. Not a guarantee, but a key. The door was locked before.

And now the door is open and you don't always know who will walk through it.

No. You don't.

And this is also a Galloni score, which carries its own framing. Vinous has been consistent about championing the finer-grained, more perfumed style. His palate and Alto Piemonte are - they suit each other.

You're saying the score isn't neutral.

No score is neutral. This is a score from a palate that responds to exactly what Alto Piemonte does. Someone else might have landed differently.

That's fair. Though I'd argue a ninety-eight from anyone is a ninety-eight.

I suppose what I want - and I know this is not how markets work -

It's not.

I want people to find Ghemme for the right reasons. The way my grandmother put it on the table. Because it was the wine of that place.

I don't disagree with that. I just think the score is neutral. It's a tool. What people do with the information is on them.

Mm. Maybe.

The generational revival is the more interesting story than the score anyway.

The people coming back.

Colombera and Garella - Giacomo Colombera and Cristiano Garella - both in their thirties, farming in Bramaterra and Lessona, appellations that barely existed on paper a decade ago in any meaningful commercial sense. They're not doing it for the score. They came back to make wine in a place they believed in.

That story doesn't need ninety-eight points to be compelling.

No. It doesn't.

Okay. So here's what I'm taking away.

Mm.

Alto Piemonte is not a footnote. It's not the rough northern cousin of Barolo. It's its own thing - glacial moraine, Spanna, a completely different expression of the same grape on completely different geology.

And a region that almost didn't survive its own century. That's not a small fact.

There is something about that continuity. The family that stayed. The vine rows you can still see going back into the forest. The wine holds all of that somehow.

The short version is: if your Italian wine program stops at the Langhe, it stops too soon.

There's a whole northern arc - Gattinara, Ghemme, Boca, Bramaterra, Lessona, Carema on the far end. These are not backup wines. They're different wines.

Each one with its own soil, its own history, its own version of what Nebbiolo can become when it's left alone to be itself.

If you can find the Breclemae 2016 - taste it. Pay attention. It asks for it.

Right.

Next time - Catherine and Marco.

Oh, that should be interesting.

We're going to argue about Sagrantino.

Catherine has opinions about Sagrantino.

Catherine has opinions about everything.

(light laugh) She does.

Is Sagrantino one of the great varieties of the world, or a curiosity that happens to grow in one small valley in Umbria? We're not going to agree.

No. We're definitely not.

That's next time.

Sotto Voce is produced by The Italian Connection. New episodes every two weeks.

Find us at ticwine.com.