Part 10 (2/2)

Thus the narrator of a novel by Beppe Fenoglio: ”Lunch and dinner were almost always dried corn mush. To give it a bit of flavor, we took turns rubbing it with an anchovy hanging from a string tied to a beam.

Even when the anchovy no longer had even the semblance of one, we still went on rubbing it for several days.”

The big change took place in the fifties. Alba had been the least indus-trialized town in the province of Cuneo; by the end of the decade it had more people employed in industry than any other. This meant prosperity for Angelo's father, who was in the construction business, 181 181 enabling him to purchase Sor San Lorenzo and other outstanding vineyards. It also meant a shortage of agricultural labor, as contadini contadini became became cittadini cittadini (townspeople). (townspeople).

What is perhaps the last generation of the old contadino contadino culture lives on in Barbaresco today. Luigi Cavallo lives at number 1 on via Torino, Turin Street. He has never been to Turin. ”I've always been here,” he says, bringing to mind that as late as the early years of this century people in the Langhe talked about Piedmont as if it began, or ended, just across the Tanaro River, which flows by Barbaresco. ”I'm going to Piedmont,” they would say. ”In Piedmont they do this and that.” culture lives on in Barbaresco today. Luigi Cavallo lives at number 1 on via Torino, Turin Street. He has never been to Turin. ”I've always been here,” he says, bringing to mind that as late as the early years of this century people in the Langhe talked about Piedmont as if it began, or ended, just across the Tanaro River, which flows by Barbaresco. ”I'm going to Piedmont,” they would say. ”In Piedmont they do this and that.”

Just a few yards up the street, at number 36, is the Gaja winery, a world of phone calls to New York and Amsterdam, of faxes to Tokyo, of BMWs with German license plates parked in the courtyard. Angelo is off to Burgundy for a meeting of French and American Chardonnay producers, but he and Guido talk about it in dialect. The language of Luigi Cavallo.

When Angelo, a Taurus who looks it, started to work at the family winery in 1961, it was the leading one in Barbaresco, but sales were mainly in Piedmont and direct to consumers in large, anonymous containers. Barbaresco was obscured not only by the shadow of French wine, but also by the more local one of Barolo: our vineyard was not only on the wrong side of the Alps, but on the wrong side of Alba as well.

Reading what the leading English-language food authorities were writing at the time would have been discouraging. Elizabeth David's cla.s.sic Italian Food Italian Food advises readers to approach Italian wine ”in a spirit of optimism and amiable inquiry rather than with harsh comparisons to the wines of France” and mentions Barbaresco only as ”another of the good wines of Piedmont” and ”interesting to try.” Somewhat later, in his advises readers to approach Italian wine ”in a spirit of optimism and amiable inquiry rather than with harsh comparisons to the wines of France” and mentions Barbaresco only as ”another of the good wines of Piedmont” and ”interesting to try.” Somewhat later, in his The Food of Italy The Food of Italy, Waverly Root d.a.m.ned Italian wines with his defensive claim that they were better than French ones with Italian food (”Who would think of drinking a fine Medoc with a dish of spaghetti and tomato sauce?”) and a.s.signed Barbaresco its routine place as ”probably the second best wine of Piedmont.” The first edition of Hugh Johnson's The World Atlas of Wine The World Atlas of Wine dedicated a whole chapter of seventy-two pages to France (”the undisputed mistress of the vine”) and thirteen pages to Italy as part of a catchall chapter on Southern and Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean; Barbaresco was presented as ”less fully ripened than Barolo.” Even the dedicated a whole chapter of seventy-two pages to France (”the undisputed mistress of the vine”) and thirteen pages to Italy as part of a catchall chapter on Southern and Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean; Barbaresco was presented as ”less fully ripened than Barolo.” Even the Random House Dictionary of the English Random House Dictionary of the English Language Language, published in 1966, had an entry for ”barolo,” but none for Barbaresco!

182 The occasional English visitors were put off by the yellowish hue of oxidated old Barolos and Barbarescos; they spoke of ”salame skin” and ”chicken skin.” If the larger world had little interest in Barbaresco, the world Angelo grew up in had little interest in it. ”It was almost impossible to find even a bottle of Chianti in Alba,” he recalls.

Trips abroad opened his eyes. He attended courses for growers in southern France. ”They were Third World, too, dealing with the same problems we had.” Bordeaux and Burgundy showed him that quality paid. But the winery's cellerman in the sixties, Luigi Rama, had no contact with the outside world. ”He lived in a world all his own,” says Angelo. ”He was the depositary of Tradition.”

But there is always a tradition prior to Tradition. Nebbiolo, for instance, had a long tradition in Piedmont, where the earliest doc.u.mented reference to it goes back to 1286. Pa.s.sing through Turin in 1787, Thomas Jefferson noted in his journal that he had tasted ”a red wine of Nebiule,”

but his tasting note (”sweet,” ”astringent,” and ”brisk as Champagne”) might strike us as quite untraditional. Yet when Barbaresco growers met over a hundred years later to form their a.s.sociation, they acknowledged that the wine their village had produced in the past ”was little better than those sweetish, sickly sweet, semi-sparkling or frothy Nebbiolos that delighted the unsophisticated palates and stronger stomachs of our forefathers” and that the new tradition of a consistently dry wine dated from the founding of the cooperative winery in 1894.

Barbaresco had been transformed before; Angelo would transform it again. He was also getting ready to see what he could do with canon-ical grapes.

A trip to California in 1973 made a deep impression on him. ”People were in wine by choice,” he says. ”They were real pros.” Above all, ”they were showing you could beat the French at their own game.”

To make way for Cabernet Sauvignon, Nebbiolo vines were ripped up below the Gaja home on the Bricco, the most prominent spot in the village. ”I didn't want to sneak it in through the back door,” says Angelo. It was as if Nebbiolo had driven Pinot Noir out of a major vineyard in Burgundy. As the work proceeded, Angelo's father would shake his head and mutter ”Darmagi,” dialect for ”What a shame!” and thus, along with the vermouth Punt e Mes, the label of Angelo's Cabernet Sauvignon now propagates Piedmontese throughout the world.

We look briefly at the history of ”foreign” grape varieties in Italy and note the long line of Piedmontese who have played a major role in experimentation with them, beginning with Manfredo Bertone di Sam- 183 buy, who, in the 1830s, planted the first Cabernet Sauvignon in Italy.

By the end of the century, experimentation was thriving in many regions, as we see from a book on the subject by Salvatore Mondini, published in 1903. (There was even a famous Cabernet vineyard in what is now a fas.h.i.+onable residential section of Rome, Parioli!) This innovative and cosmopolitan tradition was all but destroyed by phylloxera, Fascism, and two world wars. Like two other Piedmontese, Mario Incisa della Rocchetta and Giacomo Tachis, leaders of the Tuscan wine revolution with their creations Sa.s.sicaia and Tignanello, Angelo was in on the revival.

Sor San Lorenzo and other Gaja wines have become part of the world's vinous elite in terms of both price and critical acclaim, as have the wines of other producers in Piedmont and elsewhere in Italy. Having turned Fantini's vicious circle into a virtuous one, Angelo spends a lot of time on the road keeping them there.

He slams on the brakes as he spots a highway patrol car lying in wait farther up the road. ”Italian style,” he says sheepishly as the speedomet-er plunges. Angelo is a man in a hurry. ”You should have seen him tear into town on his tractor when he was still working in the vineyards,”

says Guido. Perhaps he is trying to make up for more than two centuries of lost time. Fantini, obsessed by the lack of roads and thus of trade, would have understood him.

Angelo is on his way home from a visit to Europe's largest vine nursery, at Rauscedo, near the Yugoslav border. During our visits to Sor San Lorenzo, we noticed numerous gaps where vines have been rooted up; many others ”have reached the end of the line,” as Federico puts it. Plans for replanting the vineyard are being made, and Angelo has been looking into rootstocks. The considerations are many. Resistance to phylloxera, of course. And to drought. Vigor. Will it perform well in Sor San Lorenzo's calcareous soil? Does it have rooting problems?

In the distance, hilltop Barbaresco comes slowly into focus. The cranes at the Gaja winery loom above the village coequally with its ancient tower.

Angelo's mind is racing faster than his car. It's a critical decision.

Those roots will be there for thirty years or more, entrusted with the ”savor of the earth,” the ”secrets of the soil.” And in the end, that is where it all begins: with the best grapes in the world.

184 About the Editor DANIEL HALPERN is the author of eight collections of poetry and the editor of several anthologies, most recently is the author of eight collections of poetry and the editor of several anthologies, most recently The Art of the Story The Art of the Story. He has received numerous grants and awards, including fellows.h.i.+ps from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the publisher of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.

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