A Weekend in Piedmont

Barolo cellars, fireside dinners and the Langhe in winter — three days that explain why this corner of Italy belongs to those who have learned to wait.

There is a particular cold in the Langhe in February that the locals describe as giusto — proper, correct, the cold the wine wants. It is not the harsh, dry cold of the Alps further north; it is a damp, fog-edged cold that sits low in the valleys, lifts by mid-morning, and leaves the vineyards smelling of wet earth and woodsmoke. It is also the cold of the year's quietest weeks here. The summer truffle hunters are gone, the harvest tourists are long gone, the cellars are still and full, and the great Barolo producers are, briefly, available for a serious conversation.

Why February

Piedmont, more than any other Italian wine region, has a high season and a low season that diverge sharply in character. October — the white truffle of Alba, the harvest still freshly in — is the public Piedmont. It is wonderful and we arrange a great deal of travel to it. February is the private Piedmont. The light is a long, low silver. The fog gives the vineyards the appearance of nineteenth-century photographs. The restaurants are populated by Piedmontese rather than visitors. And the cellar visits, conducted in those same weeks when the producer himself is still tasting from the previous year's barrels, take a different shape.

We do not, in February, propose group tastings. We arrange visits one cellar at a time, in our client's car or ours, with the producer himself or a senior member of his family. Two and a half hours, three estates, no more. The wines tasted are not necessarily the ones on the public list. The conversation is a real conversation. This is not winery tourism. It is something closer to the way the trade has bought Barolo for generations.

The Cellars That Will Receive You

Barolo, as a region, contains roughly two hundred and fifty producers within its eleven communes. We work closely with perhaps fifteen, and a smaller number for the most considered weekends. We do not, as a rule, propose the largest names — the Bersano-scale operations whose tasting rooms run on schedule and whose wines, however excellent, can be tasted in any good wine bar in Manhattan. We propose the producers whose annual production is between five and twenty-five thousand bottles, who farm their own vineyards, and whose work over the last fifteen years has set the contemporary style.

These are conversations, not tours. One sits at a wooden table in a small office above the cellar with a producer who has been making wine since he was eighteen, and who is happy to speak for an hour about the difference between the limestone of Castiglione Falletto and the marl of La Morra. Bottles are opened. The producer's wife brings a plate of bread and cheese. The hours pass differently than they do in the public version of this experience.

The Tables of the Langhe

Piedmont is, by some measures, the highest-density Michelin region in Italy, and yet the meals our clients remember are rarely the starred ones. The starred ones are excellent and we arrange them — Da Cesare le Calandre is a different conversation, but Piazza Duomo in Alba and La Ciau del Tornavento in Treiso are absolutely on the recommended list. The meals our clients remember, however, tend to be the family-run osterie. The Osteria della Chiocciola in Alba for the agnolotti del plin. Trattoria Marsupino in Briaglia for the vitello tonnato done as the grandmother makes it. The Locanda del Pilone for a long lunch with a view across the entire Langhe to the Alps.

These are not undiscovered places. They are simply the places one returns to when one is no longer trying to impress anyone. They are the Piedmont meals of the Piedmontese.

Where to Stay

The Piedmont luxury hotel scene has matured considerably in the last decade. The two we send most frequently are Castello di Guarene in the Roero — a restored eighteenth-century castle with twenty-six rooms, a serious wine cellar, and a position above the vineyards that catches the morning fog perfectly — and Villa Beccaris in Monforte d'Alba, smaller and quieter, with one of the best private gardens in the Langhe. For clients who want something closer to a private estate, we have also arranged stays at restored cascine — farm-houses converted at the highest level, often associated with one of the producers — that we cannot name in print.

Three days here, in the second week of February, with the cellars as the spine of the visit, is among the most concentrated experiences we arrange. It does not pretend to be a holiday. It is, more accurately, an apprenticeship. Clients leave, in our long observation, drinking Barolo differently for the rest of their lives.