Winemaker’s Italian Holiday

Buongiorno ~

I’ve just returned from an annual holiday in Italy with my wife, Patty, and daughter, Maria, visiting with dear friends at their vineyards in Tuscany, Liguria, and Piemonte, and with my brothers in Alba and Milan. Last week I posted a video log of our travels. On coming home to Barboursville, I was grateful to find that our weather has been supporting a fine and steady growing season, affording some moments now to relate how this journey illuminated our commitments here.

This fortunate holiday revealed how our well known debts to Italian viticulture are more truly endowments which sustain us. Our founder’s magnificent wine estate in Chianti, Castello di Albola, welcomed us first in this inspiring way. Often, too, our journey seemed to be responding to the call of Vermentino, by virtue of its bond with two-thirds of the regions we visited, seaside Liguria and Maremma in Tuscany. An unquestioned fixture of life in these regions, the wine is a masterpiece of generously warm growing conditions, and is appreciated as a gift which multiplies our love for so many others in our nourishment. In Piemonte, by distinction — so near in latitude yet so remote in altitude from these seaside climes — we celebrated our bond with Nebbiolo and the allure of the mountains, reinvigorating lifelong commitments, in the footsteps of our family before us.

It was the happiest celebration of family that drew us to our founder’s coastal vineyards 90 minutes away at Rocca di Montemassi in Maremma, to attend the wedding of our friend Alessandro Gallo, winemaker at both estates. Here, Francesco Zonin (R) and I were able to toast Alessandro and his bride, Monica, with winemakers from throughout the region, sharing their wines as well as his own Vermentino. Laid alongside the Tyrrhenian Sea, opposite the vineyards of Sardinia and Corsica, Maremma and Liguria are the birthplace of most of the world’s Vermentino, defining expectations for the wine and designing, to a significant extent, the gastronomic assumptions which frame it worldwide. We’re glad that our estate presents it from Virginia, to such keen acceptance across this country.

Venturing northward, toward Nebbiolo vineyards – which is to say, upward, too, into the higher elevations of Piemonte – we paused in breathtakingly beautiful Liguria, where sheer cliffs rise from the sea as dramatically as at Big Sur. Here we were met by our longtime friend and colleague in Vermentino cultivation, Paolo Ruffino at Punta Crena near Varigotti. We shamelessly feasted on the freshest seafood and local herbs and vegetables for several blissful days, in the bracing aromatic ambience of pine forests and salt sea air. Scent memory could never load any lovelier data.

Possibly nowhere else on earth is the brightly pungent “pesto” of pine nuts, olive oil, basil, and salt so obviously composed by the earth itself, scent becoming sensibility. We savored the natural accompaniment of Paolo’s Vermentino and Pigato, and met an ancient white wine he is doing much to rediscover and establish, Mataòssu. I am impressed enough by this beautiful varietal to expect to plant it at Barboursville, as soon as it may be introduced into the United States — a discovery to celebrate the transferability of a debt of place, as well as of tradition.

Traveling to Piemonte to the north and west, our route climbed to some 2,000 feet into the hills above Langhe – so familial to Patty and me – and down to 1,200 feet in the heart of Nebbiolo country, to visit my brother, Diego. Rains have been generous in this region this year. Summer’s truffles were abundant, musky, and marvelous with a serving of Tagliatelle at Diego’s Osteria dei Sognatori in Alba. I found myself conducting repeated tastings, just to be sure I wasn’t dreaming.

Before visiting with my other brother, Fabrizio in Milan, we resumed our climb to still-higher, Alpine altitudes in Piemonte above 8,000 ft, well above the tree line, entering a world of rugged, spare pastures, supporting dairy cattle in very small herds, grazing in fields heavily infused with wildflowers and herbs.

A handful of foraged porcini lies ready for a timely taking. Here the milk and the cheeses speak eloquently as they have since before the Middle Ages, of a unique and timeless floral and herbal provenance. The European Union has committed several million Euros to improving the roads and other infrastructure here, for the study and revival of herb-based medicines, which had been out of favor since the 1930s.

Diego and I reached our destination within view of the French Alps, at the medieval village of Elva – population, less than 100; age of the church, 1,000. To these fields and peaks our winemaker father, born in Liguria to a Sardinian winemaker father and a Piemontese mother, used to enjoy hiking in his youth. In time he brought us with him as we were growing up, not far from our mother’s family home in Piemonte, where her father was a grocer, maker of sausages, and beekeeper. Our parents are laid to rest now at Elva, where discovery is rewarded every day.

We’ve come home to create beautiful wine.
Please join us whenever you can.

Cordialmente ~
Luca Paschina Winemaker