2007; Christmas in the Vineyard…

December 2007

In the Piemonte and Liguria regions of Italy, older houses and dependent buildings in and around rural villages are usually clustered into what is called a “borgo.” We don’t have an exact word for this in English, but loosely translated, it means hamlet. Borgos are probably a carryover from the Middle Ages when the houses were grouped together to create some sort of protection from vandals and marauders. In the farming regions, borgos were small kingdoms ruled by feudal lords. Today, borgos, which typically consist of ten to twenty homes, are the equivalent of an American neighborhood, and just like in the States, there is often a feeling of camaraderie and curiosity about your borgo neighbors.

Our small estate is located in a borgo called Ferrere Soprano (soprano means “upper”). There is a Ferrere Sottano, meaning, “lower,” and this borgo runs along the lower border of our lower vineyard. Our house and property looks out over the rooftops of Ferrere Soprano. I like the fact that our borgo has the name Soprano, and that these two borgos get their names by where they are located on the hill. It is kind of lyrical and seems special, especially since our neighbor’s son plays classical piano and his practicing fills a couple of hours of our afternoons with amazing sound. Like all the little borgos in the region, we have an important-looking sign issued by the state that marks when you are entering our borgo proper. Our mailing address consists of the name of our town, Treiso, our borgo name, Ferrere Soprano, and our house number. There is no street name.

Once you leave the town piazza in Treiso, the road to our estate narrows, and you pass through the first borgo, which dates back to at least the early 1700s and is said to be the oldest settlement of the town. Despite being a two-lane road, the street is only wide enough for one car to pass. The buildings press upon the street so tightly you have to drive slowly so you don’t shave off your side-view mirrors, or worse, take the knees off the lady in the doorway. The road is cut along the ridge of the hill and, as you follow it out of this first borgo, vineyards slope sharply down and away from it on both sides. The land is so steep that it is a marvel it is farmed at all, let alone trellised and staked with grapevines. Manu and I like to drive and walk along this road and see what the other large wineries are doing with their grapes. Sometimes we see a bulldozer preparing the earth for new vines on these hills, and it is hard to imagine how it keeps itself from pitching down the slope. It is due to its steepness that until recently it hadn’t been farmed, but the demand for this precious land in the Langhe growing region is great and the larger wineries have just within the year of our purchasing our own property acquired it and started farming it. Walter tells me that a tractor has tumbled over itself to the bottom of the hill. He didn’t say if the driver was ok.

After the road meanders along the ridge it bends sharply left and descends down a steep hill. As you approach from above you can see our roof and the roofs of all the houses in Ferrere Soprano, each cheerfully different in all the colors of terracotta. It is a friendly scene, especially in the winter when the surrounding countryside is brown and plain.We spent Christmas this year in the Liguria region with family, but we were itching to get to Piemonte to see the progress on our house. We arrived one morning just after Christmas and if there hadn’t been such a damp chill in the air, it would have felt like we had never been away. Andrea, our contractor (and Manu’s brother), has been renovating the house full time since we left, but the façade facing the road hadn’t changed at all since the summer. Our elderly neighbor to the left was standing on her front porch as we drove up and, after a quick wave, issued her immediate and standard invitation for us to come in for an espresso, which, if I remember well, is exactly where she was and what she was calling to us when we left in September.

Our house is a typical, modest 200-year-old Piedmontese farmhouse. Like a lot of houses in the region, it has been added to and worked on over the years, and it telescopes lengthwise in a hodgepodge of finishes and materials. The rooms in our house, on both the upper and lower levels, open onto each other in a row, without hallways. It is a common architectural design from this era and the easiest way to picture it is to think of the room layout of a child’s dollhouse—each room is the exact width of the house. It is an L-shaped building, and we own the long part of the L; another family owns the smaller half. The only common wall between us and our neighbors is a short one in the entranceway running along our large stone stairway to the upstairs. Since this stone and brick wall is two feet thick, we hear nothing through the wall and there is no sense of being in an attached home with another family. Our neighbors are quiet, shy and musical. The only time we hear them is in the summer, from their open windows, when one son plays the piano beautifully in the morning or the other son plays his electric guitar, less beautifully, while singing in broken English in the afternoon.

Without question, our biggest challenge in this renovation is cutting new windows into the northwest side of the building. This side, which faces the valley, the surrounding vineyards, and the incredible view, for some inexplicable reason had only one glass-block window, completely inoperable, in the upper bathroom. We are cutting 17 windows and French doors into this northwest façade alone. I hear Manu tell people this fact proudly, although when we got the estimate from the window installation company he looked pale and pained.

Andrea had to cut the openings into the walls carefully, and he started doing that this summer. In some instances, he had to place steel beams and consult an engineer before cutting. No matter how many precautions he takes, I can see that Andrea gets nervous about the cutting. After the hole is created and the beam is safely in place, he sometimes seems giddy with relief. He likes to tell and retell the tricky details of the cutting, the engineer’s advice, and how he had to flout that advice, or at least some part of it. I think if he sees the growing expression of horror on my face while he is talking, he knows he has properly conveyed the trickiness of the whole operation, and he feels better for having shared it.

The walls are two feet thick and an enormous amount of rubble pours down when Andrea cuts an opening. A lot of the rubble consists of old handmade bricks that we will reuse in other parts of the renovation. Manu, Andrea, and I took turns this summer scraping and

chipping mortar off bricks with a hammer. One day, after I had spent a full morning performing this tedious job, Manu and I visited a large winery about thirty minutes away in the Roero region, next to Langhe, that had asked us to represent them in the United States. We found them in the midst of their own winery renovation, albeit a multimillion dollar one. When I mentioned the chore I had been performing that day, the winery owner commiserated with me as to what a tough job it was. He showed me the stacks and stacks of old bricks they had salvaged and then pointed to a big machine they used to scrape the bricks clean in minutes. I was more than a little jealous.

Our vineyard looked pretty much how we left it in September—somewhat wild and unkempt, and of course, all the vines were without their leaves. The view of our vineyard and of the surrounding hills is so different in the winter. Everything is starkly brown and earth colored and, as is typical of winter in the Langhe, there is often fog or mist in the air. In the very early morning, the light filters through the fog, making the countryside monochromatic, like a black-and-white photograph. The Langhe region might probably be more beautiful in the winter season than any other.

After spending a couple of hours going over the plans with the plumbing and electrical subcontractors, Manu and I went into town to meet up with the kids and have lunch with Walter and Rita Lodali in their trattoria (bar/restaurant). As he always is when we first arrive, Walter was eager to have us taste the new vintages of his wines. He opened a few unlabeled bottles while we waited for our pasta but saved a small, 500-milliliter bottle for last. This bottle he opened with a happy flourish, without telling us what it was. If you ever want to see the face of a proud papa, just look at Walter when he is pouring a wine that particularly pleases him, as this one obviously did.

Manu and I knew what the wine from the small bottle was as soon as we tasted it—it was the wine from our September harvest, our own Dolcetto! This was a proud moment, which is funny because, truly, we had nothing to do with the success or failure of these grapes. The vines were left this growing and harvesting season, for better or for worse, in the exact state they had been in when we bought the property last January. We had the same farmer, Oreste, tending the grapes and zealously squeezing as much yield as possible from the plants, as he had all these many years before. Our master winemaker, Giovanni Bailo, had told us he wasn’t happy with the condition of some of our vines so we were unsure about the quality we would find this year. Manu, Walter, and I were ecstatic to see that the wine is, so far, very good, and I say this completely without prejudice.

Our Dolcetto had been aging in French oak barrique for almost six months, until just days before we arrived when Walter had it transferred to stainless-steel tanks. The wine will remain in stainless steel for a month and a half. Dolcetto tends to form sediment that, unless it is removed, will impart a musky taste to the finished wine. While the wine rests in the stainless-steel tank, the sediment settles where it can be removed by opening a valve at the bottom of the tank. At this point, the wine is transferred back to the barrique. This process of barrique to stainless steel and back again will probably be repeated

several times, since all the sediment does not settle at once. It is a time-consuming and costly process, which explains the high price of this type of wine.

Our Dolcetto right now has a deep ruby red color, with a pleasant, predominantly minty flavor. Because we do not want to put our wines though microfiltration, a very small amount of sediment will remain. Such a small amount will not jeopardize the flavor of the wine, but we have to remember to state this on the label so that the consumer will know to expect it. Despite having very little to do with the development of this wine, we were proud. It was an exciting moment and, although we had several incredible Barolos and Barberas open on the table, I ate my lunch with a nice, full glass of our very young Dolcetto, and I noticed that Manu did the same.