A nobel wine almost forgotten

“If God forbade drinking, would He have made wine so good?”
— Cardinal Richelieu

I am not sure how I developed an interest in the world of wines, but I am pretty sure a bottle of Port and some local history around my valley in North Italy played a big role. I grew up on that stretch of the Alps that over the centuries were contention between Italy and France, and where the Duke of Savoy was reigning. What fascinated me when I was a child were the recurrent stories of how the Cardinal Richelieu loved the wines produced around my area.

That Cardinal Richelieu that under Louis XIII became the most powerful figure of France, but most importantly the villain in Dumas ‘Three Musketeers’. He was the villain against whom D’Artagnan, Portos and Aramis were fighting. That Richelieu, and the story goes that Richelieu used to love the wines from my valley, to the point that he used to get them delivered from my valley to Paris.

This fascinated me and seemed a bit surreal, after all only one small winery kept that tradition alive. Veronelli, one of the most influential Italian food critic and author of the food guide with the same name used to love this mountain wine and he use to praise the producers, for which he forged the term heroic viticulture. The slopes are impossible to work, the barren soil does not suit any other agriculture and the production is too small to appear on the radar of big distributors.

Heroic viticulture. That term fascinated me to the point that kept my dream alive over the following 20 years, and I never forgot that long lost tradition of wine from my valley. And bare it in mind, I am from Piedmont, where winemaking is almost a religion. Barolo, Barbaresco, Barbera and countless other wines are produced there, but long before those renowned wines were even produced, the wine from my valley were adorning the dinner tables of some of the most powerful people in Europe.

That fascination drove me to buy a small parcel of vineyard and pursue the production of this wine, and if you want to you can share this journey with us.

Michele Percivati