It’s a little bit like Côte de Nuits red Burgundy, but with more savor and firmer tannins. It’s also a little bit like Barolo, except lighter and less tannic. These are the two ways I’m accustomed to describing Valtellina Nebbiolo to those who are unfamiliar with it. And I always love to witness their reactions upon trying some: the word I’d use, in almost every case, is “enchantment.”
It’s not just the heroic details behind Valtellina wine production—the terraced slopes so steep some people use helicopters to spirit away their harvests, the remote locale hard by the Swiss-Italian Alps—but the wine itself that enchants. Driven by the Nebbiolo grape (here called Chiavennasca), the red wines of Valtellina are a captivating mix of finesse and persistence. Normally, we think of Nebbiolo wines as powerful, heady, even ferocious at times, but as expressed in the Valtellina, the grape takes on a kind of weightlessness without losing its full dynamic range of aromas. If this is perhaps a little rhapsodic for a $25 bottle of wine, well, I’m sorry. I’ve been enchanted by the wines of Rainoldi for decades and consider them one of the Valtellina’s benchmarks. And like all great estates, Rainoldi doesn’t skimp on its ‘entry-level’ wine. I can’t overstate this wine’s authenticity, charm, and superior value.
Yes, there’s tannin. And lots of earth, leather, tobacco. And bright acidity. Though often compared to Pinot Noir because of its complex aromatics, Nebbiolo is nevertheless a more full-throttle variety across the board. Fruit and color are both at the lower end of the range, but everything else is turned up to 11. In the Valtellina, however, Nebbiolo’s tannins and alcohol are dialed back a notch, and yet, while the wines are considerably lighter than their Barolo/Barbaresco cousins, they’re no less evocative. The aromas and flavors linger long after you’ve taken a sip. Valtellina Nebbiolo reinforces the importance of aroma in our perception of taste, and it redefines “intensity,” too—it’s not about size, it’s about persistence!
As I’ve noted in previous offers, Valtellina Nebbiolo may well be the most ‘Burgundian’ of any wines from the variety—although, physically speaking, Valtellina has more in common with Cornas or Côte-Rôtie, in the northern Rhône Valley, than it does with the gentle slopes of Burgundy. Centered around city of Sondrio, in the northernmost reaches of Italy’s Lombardy region, Valtellina is a deeply carved valley traversed by the Adda River, which follows an almost perfect East-West path; vineyards are planted only on the north bank of the Adda, giving them full-south, all-day sun exposures in a climate that might otherwise be too cool to ripen grapes—especially the late-ripening Nebbiolo. The steep pitches of the hillsides require the vineyards to be terraced, and they’re held in place by a network of hand-laid stone terraces that were originally thought to be the work of ancient Ligurians, who had built similar terraces in the Cinque Terre near the Mediterranean. All vineyard work here, as is plain to see, must be done by hand.
The Rainoldi family has been farming and making wines in the Valtellina since 1925 (for all its remoteness, Sondrio has been a major commercial hub for centuries); they’ve remained small and family-run, and like most of their contemporaries, their vineyards are scattered throughout the zone and don’t add up to much in terms of acreage. Many growers in the Valtellina are more accustomed to measuring vineyards in square meters, rather than acres/hectares, and for their Rosso di Valtellina the Rainoldis are sourcing from a patchwork of tiny sites in the communes of Ponte and Tresivio, at altitudes ranging from 250 to 650 meters.
Today’s Rosso di Valtellina contains 100% Nebbiolo that was fermented in stainless steel and aged in a mixture of used French oak barriques and larger Slavonian oak barrels of various sizes. It’s a ‘younger-drinking’ style by design, having spent just five months in barrel before bottling, but then again, this is Nebbiolo we’re talking about—give it at least 30 minutes in a decanter to soften its fine-grained tannins and blossom aromatically. In the glass, it’s a medium garnet red with hints of pink and orange at the rim, with the kind of aromatic profile that has you swirling and sniffing for minutes before you take your first sip: perfumed scents of cranberry, raspberry, orange peel, dried flowers, tobacco, sandalwood, and a hint of black pepper. It is medium-bodied, with a bright, racy quality that makes it a nice foil for meats and cheeses; Valtellina is known for a mountain-pastured cow’s milk cheese called Bitto, and this wine will cut through that like a pair of skis through fresh powder. Give it a rough decant and serve it at 60-65 degrees in Burgundy stems and imagine yourself at a rifugio in the Swiss-Italian Alps, red-cheeked and hungry after a morning of skiing. Try it with the attached recipe, which, while it will require a little metric conversion, couldn’t possibly be more typical of the region. You will be hooked forever after. Enjoy!
