Kate and the crew visit Roagna
We wake to another grey, foggy day, which is entirely apt. Today is to be spent in praise of Nebbiolo. The name of the grape is based on the Italian word for “fog” and derived from the centuries-old practice of harvesting in November, the month when the high, abrupt hills of Piedmont are swaddled in cold, grey folds.
Back then these wines were a version of Amarone, with high alcohols and residual sugar, and it was not until about 150 years ago that the style changed and the sinew of the variety emerged unadulterated from beneath the fat of sweetness and spirit.
We arrive at a very unprepossessing collection of shabby buildings with just a tiny, battered sign at the entrance declaring that this is the Roagna winery. I am completely new to this but Christian assures me that the wines are destined to become favourites of mine. He is right. For an ardent fan of Nebbiolo - which in the best examples combines lithe, muscular power with some of the most hauntingly subtle aromas of any variety - these are indeed on a higher level.
Luca Roagna (pictured to the left) is young for a wine maker of such talent (in his late twenties) and he looks even younger. I often find that winemakers are somehow exactly like their wines, but not in this case. Luka is fizzy with energy and enthusiasm, never standing still for too long, talking nineteen to the dozen. His wines are sensual and serious; with an elegant reticence to them. What they both have in abundance is charm and by the time we leave, all five of us are a bit in love with Luca.
We stand looking out over their Pajé vineyard which lies on a steep slope immediately below the winery and cellar. The vines, organically grown, are knee deep in exuberantly green grasses and if his wines don’t share his character then his vineyard certainly does. It vibrates with life and energy.
He speaks of his love of old vines, believing that until vines are at least 20 years old they are barely worth considering and only really start to become interesting at around 50 years. As a person who recently turned 40, I begin to feel that Luca truly is a young man of uncommonly good tastes and insight.
Although I suppose he is referring to vines and not ladies.
The soils here are a mish-mashed treasure trove of calcare, blue and grey marl, clay and sand and - unlike some regions with a similarly complex mix - they are literally all jumbled up together instead of neatly laid down in horizontal strata. This means that it is incredibly easy for roots to penetrate down and even further down, 10 to 15 metres in some cases. The family own land both here in Barberesco and in Barolo and make a Dolcetto, Barbera and of course Nebbiolo. Grapes from vines over 50 years are kept for the Riserva wines but these are only made in good or great vintages.
Luca speaks, of course, about the importance of terroir; gesturing towards a sad, bald patch of land on the opposite slope, recently cleared of forest to make way for a vineyard. This is the curse of regions this famous. Eventually, every available scrap of land, including those entirely unsuited to the growing of grapes, will be covered in vines. The bald patch is literally the only one remaining in the whole of the small valley which is not planted. Not yet, at least.
Some of Luca’s vines (those on soils containing a lot of sand), are ungrafted. They like to propagate using the layering system – a very ancient technique which involves taking a long cane from the mother plant and burying it so that it begins to develop in its own right. It remains attached to the maternal vine though, taking its soil sustenance from her roots and may only be severed at a very mature 30 years. This gives the resulting fruit of the off-spring a lot more complexity than it would otherwise have but the danger of phylloxera is always somewhat present. Standing in the thick of life in this autumnal vineyard though, it is difficult to believe that any pestilence or diseases could penetrate the aura of energy.
As much as Luca approves of layering he is categorically not a fan of clones. “I want the difference” he says simply.
He also speaks of the importance, with Nebbiolo, of harvesting when the grapes are fully ripe and not just sugar ripe. Nebbiolo has tannin. Unmistakable always, and in the lesser good or the downright bad wines the tannin is razor sharp and brutal in the mouth. He thinks that one of the problems in the region is that growers and producers do not fully grasp the importance of harvesting at precisely the right moment, blindly following neighbours and ignoring the individual microclimates of vineyard plots.
This is of course far from new or groundbreaking information. Any sensible, talented producer anywhere knows this. However, what Luca begins to talk about next is, for me, a total revelation. I first visited Piedmont in the late ‘90’s where I remember most producers speaking of the need to ferment for a shorter time at cooler temperatures in an attempt to hold onto flesh and fruit and then to add a goodly portion of vanilla cream from oak, to further gloss over the fact that essentially, what you are dealing with has broad shoulders and a lot of muscle. Most of these wines were not unlike inept, burly transvestites; utterly at odds with themselves.
Luca does almost exactly the opposite. After de-stemming, he works in big, open-top wooden fermenters (something which also helps to get rid of excess alcohol, which is terribly handy). The maceration period is long. I mean really, truly very long. Luca generally does not deliver his skins and marc to the local distillery until December 31st which, by law, is the absolute final, final, final deadline for doing so. This is astonishing information now but even more so when we start to taste.
The wines are incredibly pure, subtle expressions of the various grape varieties. Christian says that they are like “a shiatsu massage for the gums” which is absolutely not a phrase which springs to mind with much from the region but is totally apt here. We move inside, past a very old concrete tank which they use for collecting rainwater. This is then filtered and used to clean the insides of holding tanks and wooden barrels, keeping chlorinated tap water well away from the precious wines.
We are on our way to taste some wines from barrel and once we are crowded round the large wooden fermentation tanks, Luka elaborates more on his technique. He almost never does temperature control and this can get up to 32 – 34 degrees and stay there for one or two days. He believes that the really good tannins do not start to appear until the must is at 7 – 8 abv, which happens at around 30 days. After this time the long, silky tannic strands start to form, helped along by the gentle breathing in and out of the wood. He believes that the move towards seeking greater concentration is completely wrong and frankly, anyone who does not agree after tasting what he is making, deserves to have their gums sliced and their tongue trampled by a wine that has been thus manipulated.
He may keep the skins and juice together for a very long time compared to many others, but he is gentle in the extreme, trying to interfere as little as possible. The barrel samples, while showing the slightly one-dimensional nature of many wines at this stage are incredibly silky and a great taste of what is to come.
We troop down to the small bottle ageing cellar which is absolutely fridge-like in temperature. A table covered in a cheerful orange checked oil-cloth is the only sign that this is also the tasting room. At Roegna, they do not like to release the wines until they have embarked on their long journey of drinkability. In an act of astonishing commitment to quality, just before releasing older vintages of his top cuvees, Luca will open every single bottle and double check that it is in condition before recorking and labelling. He says that approximately 20 of 1200 are no good. “Too advanced” and around 10 are corked. Statistics to make the cork industry very happy, but then he does buy very top quality cork.
We start with his 2008 Dolcetto which is still a bit closed but nevertheless a most elegant example of this often terribly ungainly variety. Pure, long and absolutely delicious - or deee-li-shooos - one of Christian’s favourite words. Not having seen him for a while, I had forgotten how much I love his pronunciation. Deee-li-shoos really does go beyond merely delicious. It has more layers to it.
Next up is the 2004 Asili Barbera, a wine of amazing delicacy and elegance with sinews of pure silk. Again I wonder how it was that I detested Barbera for such a long time. The wines are cold and we are having to cup them in our hands (which are not terribly warm) to get them to show themselves. It is not just the wines. My feet have slowly started to freeze and I can no longer feel my toes. At quite regular intervals the light goes off, plunging us into pitch black, icy darkness. Luca apologises loudly in Italian and scampers off to turn them on again.
In short, these are among the worst conditions imaginable to taste wine. Particularly wines of such structure which respond incredibly badly to being sub zero. And yet this is one of the great red wine tastings of my life, notwithstanding the fact that I am not a happy person in the cold. If it is really bad it makes me want to cry. But here, with these wines, I am perfectly happy.
We move onto 2003 next, a freakishly hot vintage which produced an awful lot of jam.
“It was a terrible vintage” says Luca cheerfully “but we like this vintage”.
Unlike almost every one of his fellow producers Luca held on and harvested late, waiting for the ripe tannins and ignoring the climbing sugar levels. The grapes came in with levels which would have given alcohols over 15% abv but the slow, open top fermentation got rid of 2%, so they are now very manageable. He is very clever, is Luka.
The wines are astoundingly good. For the first time ever, I experience rose petals (a supposedly classic Nebbiolo tasting note, but not one I have never found before). They are also redolent of truffles, polished wood, crisp red berries and game and the length on all of them is fabulous; a ramrod straight seam of spiced minerality shooting down the length of the tongue to the back of the mouth where it lingers for a long time
Even then, these have something more. It is not just the complexity and the astounding elegance, how every aspect fits so perfectly with another aspect, nothing superfluous or out of place. These are wines with an added dimension that is not a flavour or a characteristic and which appeals beyond the sensual. The closest I can get to it is to say that these wines have an internal energy and the drinking of them becomes an experience which is a heady mixture for the senses, the soul and the spirit.
We taste the 2004 Pajé from Barberesco and the 2003 Barolo la Rocca del Piera as well as Vigna Rionda. All extraordinary. At this stage, I feel I may have lost the use of my chilled feet forever but it still doesn’t matter as the best is yet to come. We finish with a 1995 Riserva which spent 12 years in barrel and 2 in bottle.
The very long ageing of these wines in wood is something that the modernisers have spurned as a dusty relic of an ignorant past, supposedly giving faded wines that have lost their vigour.
Ha! is the only riposte I can offer! Keep your shellacked, point-scoring gloop: this, truly, is one of the great wines of the world.
Taut tannins stretch like skeins of silk over a marbled minerality and notes that are both sweet and savoury. Truffle abounds again and the elegance is supreme. We are all stunned into momentary silence, broken finally by a murmured
“Dee –li- shoos! Mamma Mia!” from Christian.
We finish with the 2000 Crichet Pajé which is also extraordinary although not quite at the level of the 1995 and, with great reluctance despite the privations, shuffle from the cellar and take our leave.
Lunch is just up the road in Barberesco, a restaurant called Arsivoli and we park right outside the huge brass plaque which dominates the front of the Gaja winery. A young Japanese woman pouts in front of it while her husband takes her picture. Behind him a line of couples wait to do the same.
I don’t know whether to be suicidally depressed that we live in a world where people from another culture will travel thousands of miles to worship at the shrine of mediocrity, when something extraordinary lives just down the road, or revel in the fact that this means more Roegna for us. Probably both.
I ask Christian if we should go and spit on the brass plaque as a gesture of defiance but he thinks probably not. When we walk into the restaurant, the man himself is sitting at a table to our left, blamelessly enjoying a lunch with two companions.
I give him my hardest, most disdainful stare.
He doesn’t notice. Never mind. The rabbit we have at lunch is quite simply the most extraordinary rendering of this creature I have yet tried. The wabbit of the previous night had been pretty damn good but this is on another level. It tastes like confit although apparently was merely pan fried and then roasted in white wine for a mere 45 minutes. I fear I will never be able to replicate this but I am going to give it a damn good try.