Heroic Viticulture: Farming Where Only a Vine Would Agree to Go

There is a vineyard near Carema that I keep thinking about.

Tell me.

The slope is so steep that the farmer moves sideways to work it. Not up and down. Sideways, across the hill, like a crab. And above him, there are stone columns, built by hand, supporting a canopy of horizontal vines. The whole system extends out over the slope like a shelf.

The topie.

The stone pillars. Yes. And I kept thinking: this was not built for the convenience of whoever is working here. This was built for the vine.

The Italians have a name for vineyards like this. Viticoltura eroica. Heroic viticulture.

And it is not just a description.

It is a legal designation. Under Italian wine law, a vineyard qualifies if the slope exceeds thirty percent, or if it sits above five hundred meters altitude, or if it requires terrace farming, or island farming, where no machine can reach. The vine must be worked entirely by hand.

I am Giulia Renard.

And I am Marco Bellini. This is Sotto Voce, episode six. Today we are going to talk about what it actually means to farm a slope that by any rational measure should not be farmed.

Let me start with geography, because these vineyards are not concentrated in one place.

There are four landscapes in Italy where heroic viticulture defines the wine almost completely. Carema and the Valle d'Aosta in the northwest. Cinque Terre on the Ligurian coast. Valtellina in Lombardy, running along the Adda valley under the Alps. And the terraced hillsides above Trento in Trentino.

Each one extreme in a different way.

Carema: steep granite slopes at four to six hundred meters, a grape called Picotener, which is Nebbiolo with a different name and a different character, and the topie system you saw. Cinque Terre: cliff-face terraces above the Ligurian Sea, slopes of sixty and seventy percent, vines harvested into baskets because there is no machine that could work there. Valtellina: south-facing Alpine terraces at three to seven hundred meters, Chiavennasca, which is Nebbiolo again, under different conditions. And then the highest of all: the Valle d'Aosta, above a thousand meters, the highest DOC in Europe.

The Blanc de Morgex.

Blanc de Morgex et de La Salle. A grape called Prie Blanc, grown on its own roots, ungrafted, because phylloxera never reached a thousand meters altitude. These are pre-phylloxera vines, still alive, still producing. In conditions that would have killed anything else.

And Valtellina does something I did not expect from a mountain.

Valtellina runs along the Adda valley in Lombardy, right under the Alps. South-facing terraces of Chiavennasca, which is Nebbiolo under yet another name, on stone walls that climb the mountain in narrow steps at three to seven hundred meters. And there they make Sforzato di Valtellina, a dry red built by appassimento. They lay the Chiavennasca grapes out to dry for weeks, the way Amarone is made, and then ferment them fully dry. A mountain Nebbiolo with the concentration of a raisined wine.

So even within heroic viticulture, the same grape becomes several different wines.

And then the terraces above Trento, in Trentino, where the slopes are a little gentler but still worked by hand on narrow benches cut into the hillside. Four landscapes, one refusal.

If you listen to all of these, the thing they share is not the grape or the region. It is the refusal to farm somewhere easier.

Which is where the economics become very strange.

Tell me the numbers.

A flat, mechanized vineyard needs one hundred to two hundred hours of labor per hectare per year. A heroic viticulture vineyard needs one thousand to two thousand hours. Entirely by hand. There is no shortcut.

Ten times the work.

At minimum. And the plots are small. In Carema, the average holding is a fraction of a hectare. In Cinque Terre, a family might farm three or four terraces, a quarter of a hectare total. The wine that comes out of these vineyards cannot pay for the labor that goes into them. Not at any price a normal consumer will accept.

In Cinque Terre, even getting the grapes off the slope is its own problem.

The grades there reach sixty and seventy percent. There is no road, no tractor, no path a vehicle could take. Historically the harvest came down on the backs of the pickers, in baskets, terrace by terrace. Today some growers have installed a small monorail, a single rack-and-pinion track that carries crates up and down the cliff. In the hardest plots they have lifted the fruit out by helicopter. That is the cost of a wine before a single grape is even pressed.

A helicopter, for a wine that cannot cover its own labor.

That is the paradox in a single image.

So the question is: why does anyone continue?

There are several answers. And none of them are purely economic.

Start with the one that surprised you most.

The landscape itself is the argument. If you stop farming a heroic viticulture vineyard, it does not simply become a field. In Liguria, the dry-stone terrace walls require constant maintenance. The vine root holds the soil. Without it, the walls begin to crumble, the terrace fails, and the slope becomes unstable. There have been landslides in Cinque Terre where vineyards went back to scrub and the land gave way. These are not just wine regions. They are agricultural engineering projects that have been running for a thousand years.

The vine is holding the hill together.

The vine is holding the hill together. And the farmer knows it.

There is something about that knowledge that changes what you think you are doing when you go out to prune in January.

You are not farming wine. You are farming a hillside that happens to produce wine.

Let me talk about Carema, because it is where the cooperative model makes the economics possible at all.

Produttori di Carema.

Founded in 1959. Roughly seventy families, each working a few terraces of topie-trained Picotener on the steep granite slopes at the entrance to the Aosta Valley. The plots are too small for any individual to run a winery. But if you pool seventy families, you have enough grapes to make a wine worth producing.

The cooperative does what the individual plot cannot.

And the topie system is worth describing, because it is completely specific to this place. The stone columns, the topie, were built by the farmers themselves over generations. Each one is mortared granite, and they support a horizontal pergola of chestnut poles and wire. The vine grows outward along this structure, over the slope rather than up a wall. It maximizes the sun exposure on terrain where nothing else would work.

And the word itself is local. A single pillar is a topia. More than one, and they become topie. The grammar of the dialect grew up around the structure, which tells you how central it is. You name a thing that carefully only when your whole livelihood leans on it.

How much wine does all of that effort actually produce?

Between fifty and seventy thousand bottles in a year. For the entire appellation. That makes Carema one of the smallest DOCGs in all of Italy. A single well-known Barolo estate can make as much on its own. The whole of Carema, seventy families and centuries of stone, fits into what one large producer turns out in a season.

That changes how you hold the bottle.

The system was designed before anyone thought of it as a system. Each family built their pillars to solve the problem of their particular slope. The consistency came from the landscape, not from a plan.

And the wine that comes out: pale ruby, lighter than a Barolo, with a lift that comes directly from the altitude and the granite. The altitude is in the glass.

Picotener at five hundred meters on granitic soils tastes different from Nebbiolo in the Langhe. Not better or worse. Just the specific result of specific conditions.

The Blanc de Morgex is the most extreme version of this logic.

The Cave du Vin Blanc de Morgex et de La Salle cooperative, at nine hundred to thirteen hundred meters in the Aosta Valley. The Prie Blanc vines are ungrafted because phylloxera cannot survive those altitudes. They are connected directly to their roots in the way almost no European vines have been since 1870. The wine is very light, very pale, mineral. It is almost more about the altitude than about the grape.

A wine that tastes like snow in the air.

Mm. Perhaps.

I want to ask the uncomfortable question. Can this continue?

Honestly?

Honestly.

The people who maintain most of these vineyards are not young. The work is physically demanding in ways that most farm work is not. In Cinque Terre and in Carema both, the average age of the cooperative members has been rising for decades. The younger generation has options that did not exist before: they can earn more with less effort almost anywhere else.

And the EU programs? There are subsidies for this.

The European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development has specific agri-environment schemes for heroic viticulture. Italy's national recovery plan includes support. Agritourism helps in places like Cinque Terre, where the landscape itself draws visitors. But subsidies do not change the fundamental mathematics. They delay the problem.

So what changes the mathematics?

The wine being valued at what it actually costs to produce. Which would mean Carema at a hundred and twenty euros a bottle, not at thirty-five. And that is a price the market will not pay for a wine it does not know yet.

There is something about that gap, between what the wine costs to make and what anyone will pay for it, that feels like the real story.

Every heroic viticulture wine is produced at a loss, in some sense. The farmer absorbs the difference in time and effort. What holds the system is not the price but the culture: the identity, the cooperative bond, the knowledge that what you are doing matters beyond the wine.

And the landscape. Always the landscape.

And the landscape.

So where does that leave the listener who wants to engage with this, concretely?

Start with Carema. It is the most accessible entry point: available in the United States, not expensive relative to what it is, and directly tied to the cooperative model we have been describing. A bottle of Produttori di Carema is the pooled labor of roughly seventy families working slopes that no machine has ever touched.

The Etichetta Bianca is the younger wine. Minimum four years total before release. The Etichetta Nera is the riserva, six years minimum, aged in large Slavonian oak casks. No new oak in either case.

And when you drink it, pay attention to the color. It is paler than you expect from a Nebbiolo wine. The altitude does that. The granite does that. The result is a wine with more transparency than weight, more aromatic precision than power.

There is a lightness in it that Barolo does not have. Not because Carema is less serious. Because it is made from the same grape in a completely different condition.

Perhaps this is what heroic viticulture wines have in common across all their different regions: they taste like their conditions in a way that comfortable vineyards do not. The difficulty is audible in the wine.

The effort is in the glass.

Every heroic viticulture wine is an argument that some things are worth doing at a loss. We do not have many such arguments left.

Next time: we look at organic and biodynamic farming, and whether the certification tells you anything useful about the wine. I am Giulia Renard.

And I am Marco Bellini. Thank you for listening to Sotto Voce.