Piemonte: The Region That Came to Us

by Joseph Harris

Most of the regions in our journals arrived through travel — a trip, a meal, a market, a kitchen in someone else's country where something clicked into place. Piedmont arrived differently. Piedmont did not wait for me to go there. It sent people instead.

Three of them, to be precise. Three men connected to the hills of the Langhe, to the Nebbiolo grape, to the serious and uncompromising wine culture of northwestern Italy, who found their way to Mendocino County and into the life of this restaurant by routes that had nothing to do with each other and everything to do with the same deep commitment to Italian wine done correctly.

The first is Alan Pacini. Alan is my primary source for the Italian wines on this list — the expert, the guide, the person who knows not just what is available but what is worth having and why. When I wanted to build a serious Italian regional wine program, Alan was the person who made it possible. The Boglietti Barolos, the La Spinetta Barbaresco, the depth and specificity of the Italian side of this list — that is Alan's knowledge translated into bottles on a shelf in Fort Bragg. A man from Piedmont building an Italian wine program on the Mendocino coast. These things happen when you find the right person.

The second is Lou Bock of Lou Bock Wine and Spirits, who brought me to Enzo Boglietti. Boglietti is a small artisan producer in the Langhe, farming less than five hectares across several single-vineyard sites — Boiolo, Case Nere, Foisanti, Arione — each one expressing a different argument about what Nebbiolo can do when the soil and the exposure and the farmer are all paying attention. The wines are serious without being unapproachable, precise without being cold. They are the wines of someone who knows exactly what they are doing and has no interest in explaining it to people who are not listening. Lou found them. They are on the list. Four single-vineyard Barolos from one small producer in the Langhe, available by the glass on a Tuesday night in Fort Bragg. That does not happen anywhere else.

The third is Greg Graziano of Graziano Family of Wines in Redwood Valley. To say that Greg grows Italian varietals in California is to describe the ocean as damp. Greg's grandfather Vincenzo immigrated from the Piedmonte region of Italy and planted the first Graziano vineyards in Mendocino County in 1918. He brought the vines with him — literally, in suitcases — Nebbiolo, Dolcetto, Barbera, Arneis, Moscato, the varieties of the Langhe hills carried across the Atlantic and planted in the warm inland valleys of Mendocino County where they have been growing ever since. The vines on Greg's property today are the grandchildren of vines from Piedmont. They have been in this ground for over a hundred years.

Greg was also the first producer of Pinot Grigio in California. His four labels — Saint Gregory for Burgundian varieties, Monte Volpe for the reds of Tuscany, Enotria for the wines of Piedmont, and Graziano for old-vine Zinfandel and Petite Sirah — constitute the most complete Italian varietal program in the state. Sangiovese, Montepulciano, Negroamaro, Aglianico, Vermentino, Tocai Friulano, Falanghina, Fiano, Greco di Tufo, Ribolla Gialla — varieties that other California wineries treat as curiosities, Greg farms as a vocation and a family obligation. The Moscato Enotria on our list is his. It has been there since before this chapter was written.

Greg made my wine. The Costa Vineyards Pinot Noir that sits on this list — grown at our Comptche Ranch in the hills between the coast and the inland valleys, at an elevation where the fog comes and goes and the growing season is long and cool — was vinified at Greg's winery in Redwood Valley. The fruit traveled from the cool hills to the warm valley, from our ground to his cellar, built on the same land his grandfather planted with Italian vines in 1918, and came back as something that carries both places in the bottle. A fourth-generation Piedmontese-American winemaker making a Mendocino coast Pinot Noir on land his family has farmed for over a century. The geography alone is a conversation worth having. The history makes it something more.

This is how Piedmont came to Cucina Verona. Not through a flight or a guidebook or a research trip through the Langhe in October when the truffles are coming out of the ground and the fog sits in the valleys between the vine rows and the whole region smells like the inside of a wine cellar. Through people. Through relationships built over years around a shared conviction that Italian wine done correctly is one of the great achievements of agricultural civilization and that the Mendocino coast deserves access to it.

Piedmont itself is the northwestern corner of Italy, pressed against the Alps on three sides and open to the Po valley on the fourth. The name means foot of the mountains, and the mountains are always present — in the weather, in the soil, in the character of the people who live there. The Langhe hills south of Alba are where Nebbiolo reaches its highest expression, in the communes of Barolo and Barbaresco, in vineyards so well mapped and so carefully documented that the names of individual plots carry legal weight and centuries of reputation. Barolo is sometimes called the king of Italian wines and the wine of kings, which is the kind of description that usually indicates marketing rather than truth. In this case it is simply accurate.

Nebbiolo is named for the nebbia — the fog — that fills the Langhe valleys in October when the grape is harvested. It is a late-ripening variety that needs a long warm season to develop its sugars and a cool harvest to preserve its acidity, which is why it grows almost nowhere outside Piedmont with any distinction. It is high in tannin, high in acid, capable of extraordinary longevity, and in its youth can seem almost impenetrable — the kind of wine that requires patience from the drinker the way it required patience from the farmer. A young Barolo is not a comfortable wine. An aged Barolo is one of the most complex and moving things you can put in a glass.

The Barbaresco from La Spinetta is the more immediately approachable expression — same grape, slightly lighter soil, a little less tannin, a little more accessible in its youth. It is where we begin Tuesday night, by the glass, at a price that makes it possible. The Boglietti Barolo is the upgrade for the table that wants to go further. We are pouring wines that are never available by the glass because the economics of the bottle do not normally allow it. Tonight they do. That is the point of a Tuesday in Piedmont.

The food of Piedmont is butter and egg yolk and white truffle and the patience to let good ingredients arrive at their own conclusions. The tagliolini — what the Piedmontese call tajarin, what we call tagliolini in this kitchen — is the thinnest egg pasta in Italy, made with more yolks than any other region would consider reasonable, rolled until it is almost translucent, cut into threads that cook in two minutes and want nothing more than good butter and, if the season and the budget allow, white truffle shaved over the top at the table. June is not truffle season — that is October and November, when the Langhe fog settles in and the truffle hunters go out with their dogs before dawn. We use truffle oil, or black truffle if available, and the pasta is still the point. The yolks do the work.

The chicken on Tuesday night is Pollo al Barolo — braised low and slow in Nebbiolo with juniper, rosemary, and the root vegetables of the Langhe hills. The traditional preparation uses rabbit, which is what the Piedmontese family ate on ordinary Sundays when the brasato al Barolo was reserved for celebration. We use chicken because it is what the kitchen can source reliably and because chicken thighs braised for two hours in a good Nebbiolo with juniper berries and rosemary emerge as something that has almost nothing in common with what went into the pot. The wine reduces around the meat, concentrating into a sauce that carries the tannin and the fruit and the particular mineral quality of the Langhe into every bite. You are tasting the same hills that produced the wine in the glass. That is not an accident. That is the point of cooking with the wine you are drinking.

The bresaola in the antipasto is cured beef — air-dried, thinly sliced, dressed with lemon and olive oil and arugula and Parmigiano. It introduces the evening quietly, before the richness of the tagliolini and the depth of the braise. The chickpea soup with rosemary is the Piedmontese peasant kitchen at its most honest — legumes, olive oil, good stock, an herb that grows everywhere and costs nothing and transforms everything it touches. The panna cotta closes the meal the way Piedmont closes everything — with a simplicity so precise it looks effortless and takes more skill than it appears.

This Tuesday, Piedmont is here because the people it sent arrived first. Greg made the wine. Alan built the list. Lou found Boglietti. The kitchen is simply catching up to what the wine program already knew.

Chi mangia bene vive bene. In Piedmont they pair it with Barolo and consider the argument closed.

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124 East Laurel Street, Fort Bragg, California