The ongoing wine renaissance in the
alto Piemonte, or “upper Piedmont,” is one of the great stories in Italian wine. A century ago, vineyards blanketed the Alpine foothills north of Novara and the region produced far more Nebbiolo than Barolo or Barbaresco; today, northern Piedmont makes a tiny fraction of what it once did, while Barolo and Barbaresco enjoy global reach. But the time is now to re-discover northern Piedmontese appellations such as Gattinara (where Barolista Roberto Conterno recently arrived, with the purchase of Nervi), Ghemme, Lessona, and the source of today’s wine, Bramaterra.
What you’ll find, in wines like Le Pianelle’s 2016 “Al Forte,” are reds that cede no ground whatsoever to their more-famous Nebbiolo cousins. Things are moving fast in this part of the world, as more interest and investment pours in, and the Le Pianelle property is emblematic of that: Founded in 2004, when two partners purchased one of Bramaterra’s many abandoned vineyards, Le Pianelle’s winemaking is overseen by a young dynamo named Cristiano Garella—a homegrown talent with his hands in many exciting projects in the region. Garella’s fellow “native son,” Andrea Zanetta, handles viticulture. “Al Forte” is a new wine for this dynamic estate, and it’s not only the best wine I’ve tasted from them but one of the best alto Piemonte reds I’ve ever had. Everything you could want from a Nebbiolo-based wine is there in spades, except for the high alcohol and tannin. The price is right, too, especially for a wine that promises to improve over the next 5-7 years. If you love Italian wine, this is a new benchmark.
I’d expect nothing less from Garella, who I first met many years ago when he worked for the historic Sella estate in nearby Lessona. He’s a young, thoughtful, serious guy who is very proud of his home region, and has become the go-to winemaking consultant in the area. The Le Pianelle partnership started with Dieter Heuskel and Peter DiPoli—the latter a prominent wine producer and writer in the Alto Adige—who in 2004 began the arduous task of assembling dozens of tiny plots acquired from many small local farmers. All the wine zones in the alto Piemonte are shadows of their former selves, in terms of vineyard acreage (or rather, hectareage): A century ago, this area boasted about 100,000 hectares of vineyards, whereas today there are only about 2,500. One reliable source puts the Bramaterra DOC’s total vineyard at just 30 hectares, and even Gattinara—the biggest and best-known appellation of the bunch—isn’t too much bigger. About five years ago, the last time I was in the area, I was curious, given the rising fortunes of wines from the area, why we weren’t seeing more “new” labels and wines in the market. It was explained that most of the vineyard land is held by smallholders, many of them elderly and disinclined to sell. “You spend more on the notary than you do on the parcels themselves,” one producer told me.
The vineyards of Le Pianelle, assembled over the course of five years and farmed organically, are in the villages of Brusnengo and Roasio, climbing to some significant altitudes in the shadow of Monte Rosa, one of the big peaks of the Swiss-Italian Alps. Brusnengo is the ‘anchor town’ of the Bramaterra DOC, which is sandwiched between Gattinara and Lessona west of the Sesia River. Soils are a mix of marine sand, clay, glacial moraine, and quartz-rich volcanic material from the “Valsesia supervolcano,” which is believed to have erupted 290 million years ago, before the formation of the Alps.
Today’s 2016, called “Al Forte”—named for the road the winery sits along—does not carry the Bramaterra DOC designation; Garella and company decided to de-classify it at the last minute, choosing essentially to bottle both this wine and the ’16 Bramaterra by soil type. Al Forte, a blend of 70% Nebbiolo, 20% Croatina, and 10% Vespolina, comes from vineyards with more iron-rich clay in the soil, lending a darker tone to the fruit and a deeper mineral component, compared to the more perfumed Bramaterra, which comes from vineyards rooted in marine sands. After a fermentation on native yeasts, the wine was aged 18 months in large French oak casks before bottling.
The appeal of Al Forte for me is that, as I noted above, it has the power and persistence of a Barolo wine but with a gentler tannic profile and a little less alcohol. In the glass, it’s a deep garnet moving to crimson and pink at the rim, with perfumed aromas of dried black cherry, raspberry, tiny wild strawberries, black tea, blood orange peel, rose petals, and darker notes of turned earth and pulverized rocks. It has a very focused, firm structure, and excellent balance at this young stage in its life, improving nicely after about 30 minutes in a decanter. As a short-term ager, I think this wine is going to be fantastic, best served in Burgundy stems at a cool 60 degrees. All the classic Nebbiolo pairing options are on the table here—mushroom risotto, white truffles over pasta, braised beef—but
fonduta (fondue) is an appropriately Swiss-inflected twist. You need to try it (and if you can get your hands on some white truffles, all the better)! Cheers!
