So, I’ve covered how we got from forests to orchards, then how to get from apples to ciders. It’s been the literary equivalent of when you’ve sat at a tasting with a flight of glasses occasionally sniffing a few of them to pass the time whilst they just keep blathering on…

I’m not saying it's not interesting, I do also realise that the point of drinks for them to be drunk! So let’s get on with it.

People have approached me in the past asking for recommendations on “where to start” when it comes to cider. I say “approached”, usually I’ve lead them down the path of explaining the chequered history of cider in Italy before stopping the anecdote short and telling them they can read the rest on my substack…

That being said, I think it’s helpful to have a trio of bottles in the holster to recommend people who are interested to try something new.

This is not like recommending wines, mind you. Almost everyone has some level of experience when it comes to wine. Recommend them a wine and you will most likely be a) not recommending them their first ever wine and b) recommending something that is not completely outside of their frame of reference for what “wine” is.

Recommending cider, on the other hand, you are either recommending to people who only have experience with an industrial product made with roughly one third fermented apple juice concentrate and two thirds fizzy water, or they have no experience whatsoever.

With that in mind, I’ve more or less stuck to the shallower end of the pool. A bit of residual sugar in 2 of the three acts like a handrail to ease you out of any cloistered, industrially shaped, understanding of cider you might be in.

These are three approachable bottles, both in taste and price, respectfully and artfully made that are reasonably easy to source in the UK. On top of that, these are all first rate producers, the appearance of their names on any drinks list, regardless of specific labels, indicates that the drinks director is looking out for you, is caring for you, and wants you to have a good time even if you don’t drink wine.

Sorry international readers (of which there are a majority!) I will eventually put together lists for other parts of the world. Though it’s worth mentioning that some of these bottles will probably be available in Japan too.

Declaration: All of these bottles were sourced from the Fine Cider Company shop in East London and bought with my own money at full price, including some bottles that I deemed unworthy to make the cut. This is not any sort of collaboration, nor will dropping my name in conversation get you any sort of discount (unfortunately…)

Cheddar On My Mind #4, NV - Oliver’s Fine Cider (Herefordshire)

Styled in a classically West Country fashion, I think it’s great to kick off with a bottle that’s oozing as much class Roger Federer in the late 00s. I might’ve only been six years old for the ‘08 Wimbledon final against Nadal, but I’ve watched the highlights and am confident that this cider has the intrigue to match. The largest part of this blend (48%) is Kingston Black, a variety famous for its all-rounder performance, that is accompanied by an orchestra of a further twenty four parts from barrels – and this really is quite the symphony of gingerbread, roasted peaches and brown sugar on the nose.

It’s an off-dry blend – for those who arrive at this bottle having journeyed away from supermarket cans, this still may come as a shock to the taste buds. Don’t worry, this is part of your Damascene conversion to full juice cider. The juice concentration that is commonplace in mass-market cider favours apples with almost no tannins, that will likely also be a shocking to the palate and will likely make it taste dryer than it is. For those who have instead arrived from wine, this sugar is kept firmly in check by an acidity that comes across almost as spicy and robust tannins — citrus and oily herbs to finish.

It’s bold. It needs to be bold. It’s made with the expressed instruction to be enjoyed with raw milk cheddar. Only a cheese this bold could find itself at the centre of an international fraud case. If you're feeling up to it, ’s soufflé for one would be the obvious direction to take this relationship in. If not, I’m sure settling for the largest chunk of Westcombe Cheddar you can find wouldn’t disappoint.

7.2% — £13 from the Fine Cider Company

£12 from Cat in the Glass

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Table Cider, NV - Little Pomona (Herefordshire)

First of all, credit must be given to a bottle label that includes an image of the bottle itself on the label (one must presume that that label must also include an image of the bottle and so on, and so on, and so on).

This is a cider that borders on rambunctious. With a well integrated, if not whisperingly volatile, acidity. This is not a million miles away from a profile that would be familiar to anyone who’s drunk the likes of Walter Massa and La Stoppa’s Barbera – notes of extended ageing kept fresh with bright acidity. It fits the bill as a drink to share with food for sure. If this be your starting point for (real) cider you may experience momentary whiplash as you are brought into an understanding of the sheer power that comes with 100% juice in just one sip.

Honeycomb richness, redcurrants to bring their zing, finished with a touch of bramble-like tannin to round things out.

It is also worth noting that this cider is bottled as rolling blend and is, therefore, subject to slight changes based on different bottlings. Having drunk many bottles over the past 5 years, I can only say it has gotten better and better as the seasons have kept on turning. For pairings, I would go down the path of something that would keep this cider in its place. After a think about what could keep this cider in check, I landed on ’s Minced lamb and artichokes, but anything with a hearty spice and generous fat (even black pudding!) would go down a treat.

7% — £13 at the Fine Cider Company

£12 from Cat in the Glass

£10.35 from

Porter’s Perfection & Dabinett, 2023 - Wilding Cider (Somerset)

A near 50:50 blend of two bittersweet varieties, co-fermented and bottled as a (disgorged) Pet-nat. Bone dry with both tannins and (a very clean) acidity that certainly do not go quietly. Owing to the different ways in which grapes and apples ripen, wine pet-nats are often picked slightly early to maintain a bright acidity - at a cost of phenolic ripeness. Almonds, olive brine and a slight herbaceous note to the nose make it clear no phenolic ripeness has been lost here.

The sparkle has also calmed slightly given three years’ bottle ageing. Whilst pet-nats can often have an almost rasping, and often fleeting, sparkle to them these bubbles are happy to hang around. As such, you don’t miss anything in the way of apricot jam and fresh rhubarb that this bottle is packing.

If the Mediterranean has the plants of the maquis, or macchie, biome that influence the viticulture, then surely this bears the mark of a decidedly British biome. It’s out with Jancis Robinson’s description of “hot stones” and in with cold stones! These aren’t the sunbaked, lizard congregating, rocks that are surrounded by cicadas from dawn ‘til dusk throughout the Mediterranean. These stones with moss growing on them that hear only the sound of a river dancing to the tune of leaves blowing in the wind.

It’s calling for salt, to keep things fresh, so salt we must give it. The first port of call in a salty storm is, obviously, a bed of oysters but if someone who knew their way around a salt shaker handed me a rotisserie chicken, I certainly wouldn’t turn it down.

7.4% — £18 at the Fine Cider Company

I once asked a well renowned French cider producer what he looked for in a good cider. Looking me dead in the eye, if not with a slightly annoyed look on his face, he responded:

“A good cider should open your mind.”

I hope anyone who goes out and tries any of these ciders has their mind opened!

When I started leading cider tastings at university and later with Slow Food, one of the most common questions would invariably be “is there a way I should taste cider?”

At first, I thought this was a strange thing to ask. The people who came to these tastings were no strangers to wine or indeed any other sort of culture specific fermented products. Yet clearly a stumbling block existed in their minds between their understanding of wine and how they were going to ever understand cider.

For a long time, I politely dismissed the question. I thought they should just take everything they know about wine and cast that knowledge over cider, but it doesn’t work like that. I would refer often refer to it as taking off your grape tinted glasses and instead approach concepts like terroir with apple tinted ones. Luckily, I learnt it isn’t that simple.

In order to build an understanding of cider with parity to an understanding of wine, a few things must be pointed out

Red or White

Starting with the most important, or the most difficult, depending on how you look at things.

There is no Red-White divide when it comes to cider.

It’s the first question to the table when the wine list is opened (presuming the person holding it has opted to decide on a bottle democratically…). Red-White nicely splits a very large and diverse category of drinks roughly down the middle and relies only upon the ability to discern two colours from each other.

Cider can’t be meaningfully divided by colour since it doesn’t get its colour the same way a wine gets its colour. Since wines get their colour from grape skins and grape skins also contain tannins, basic assumptions can be made between darkness of hue and strength of tannins (with obvious exceptions in light coloured, high tannin varieties).

In the case of cider, you need to pay attention to variety or a more general category of variety, not colour. Thankfully, in the pockets of the world that have a tradition of making tannic cider, they categorise their apples accordingly. In England, for example, these are described as bittersweet and bittersharp if they have high tannins but low or high acidity, respectively. If they lack tannins, they are simply referred to as sweet and sharp on account of their acidity.

“But tannins are perceived as astringency, not bitterness!” I know, I know. However there are some tannins that are perceived as bitter, albeit a small minority, though these crop up more often in cider than they do in wine (though I still wouldn’t say its common)

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The reason why colour ≠ tannins in cider, for those that are interested

I get that some people might not like the science, but I think it’s pretty cool and I definitely didn’t write a whole article on this particular subject before thinking it was a tad overwhelming…

The reason that cider doesn’t have a red-white divide is all to do with structure. Apples can’t be pressed straight away like grapes can, they must first be milled into a coarse pulp. Straight away, this removes the possibility that is available to winemakers of managing grape juice, with little/no colour or tannic structure, separately from the grape skins, that bring all the colour and tannins, since apple skins get milled along with the pulp.

In winemaking, the process of getting the colour and tannins from the skins into the juice is called maceration and is best likened to making a cup of tea (steeping a flavour giving thing in a less flavoured liquid). This is/can be done in winemaking because a) a grape is soft enough to squeeze its juice without too much disruption of the skins and b) the flesh of the grape doesn’t have much tannin, if any at all so the difference between skins and no-skins is large. Not only can apples not juiced without smashing them up, they also store their tannins throughout the apple. Yes, there are higher concentrations in the skins but being a larger fruit the skins are nothing compared to the fruit as a whole.

In cidermaking, maceration refers to something else completely! Maceration is the period of time after the apples/pears have been milled into a coarse pulp but before they have been pressed. This allows tannins that were previously locked inside the cells of the apple to be exposed to oxygen which, as we all known, causes apples to go brown. This browning is the tannins tanning! The tannins are being exposed to oxygen and irreversibly binding to the pulp and making it go brown. When it then comes to pressing this macerated pulp, the tannin content of the juice will be lower than if it was pressed immediately with no contact to the air.

“So lighter in colour means more tannic than a darker colour?” you may reasonably ask.

Unfortunately it isn’t that easy either on count of several reasons. Much like how grapes differ in their colour to tannin ratio (e.g. Nebbiolo) so too do apples in the amount that they brown. Whilst colour of juice gets deeper during maceration, it also can get lighter again during fermentation1. Perry pears in particular need to be macerated so that their tannins too don’t join together during fermentation. Whilst this would appear as flaky sediment in a wine, pear tannins can easily conglomerate into tofu/brain like structures floating around in a fermenting vat.

Sugar, sugar

You’ll notice the varieties being categorised as bittersweet or bittersharp. Remember that this is a categorisation of the variety and not what the cidermaker chooses to do with it.

The sweetness that awaits you in the bottle will be presented as something on the “dry, off-dry, medium, medium sweet (?), sweet” spectrum. As far as I’m aware, this spectrum doesn’t follow the German Riesling-esque rigour of actually having strict definitions for the sugar content for each term. As with many things in the world in general, I hope that changes some time soon.

Of the classic unfortified sweet wines of the world, very few of them undergo skin-contact. They are generally aiming for a balance of acidity and sweetness, without tannins getting a look in on the action. Besides, it is generally ill advised to macerate grapes affected by noble rot whilst it would be simply impossible to macerate an ice wine since the grapes would thaw.

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Residual sugar is more common in cider. Is this because of tradition or consumer expectation? I’m not sure, it is definitely a topic I will come back to. When cider and perry is made via some form of arrested fermentation (stopping fermentation before its 100% complete, something else I'll come back to) they are still able to retain a lot of their tannic structure since this was there from the start based on the varieties chosen by the cidermaker. This is in direct contrast to wines made by arrested fermentation (sweet Rieslings) which often see very minimal skin contact with winemakers trying to minimise tannic extraction.

I think this opens a unique door for cider, the interplay of sugars, acidity AND tannin is something that is very rarely found in wines despite the fact it has a ver large scope of pairings.

Alcohol and terroir

In discussions about cider and wine, someone invariably brings up representing terroir. This is sometimes followed up with a mention of grapes having orders of magnitude more polyphenols, and therefore a much wider spectrum of possible variation, than apples.

Without going into a discussion of the polyphenol content of certain laudable apple varieties, or challenging people on whether or not you can actually perceive all of those polyphenols, one thing does remain true: this “phenolic representation” that wine undoubtedly has also comes with quite a sizeable serving of alcohol. There’s nothing wrong about that in and of itself but this alcohol content is only getting higher and higher as the climate is getting warmer and warmer. I’ve had some lovely 16% Cannonau in Sardegna but would I want to open a bottle for lunch? Maybe not.

Cider can happily sit at half the alcohol of wine. Yes, it is also witness to the same increase in temperatures but at least it’s starting from a lower step on the ladder that it will undeniably have to climb. Two 75cl bottles amongst three friends can easily be sunk over lunch and people can get on with their day afterwards. St John in London has even started serving perry for breakfast!

Thanks for reading. Next time I will present a little “cider starter pack” of three ciders that represent everything I've been talking about so far. They might be quite UK-centric, so if anyone wants to consult for USA (where I have my second largest readership) then please get in touch, cheers!

The picture above shows a curious mix: wild vines with ‘plenty’ of fruit on them, in and amongst a seedling quince, and a fig tree that probably got there after a bird enjoyed a nice lunch. I’d love to focus in on its wildness but I know full well that I took this photo standing on a smooth tarmac road outside of quite a nice house in an Italian town.

So its hardly “wild”.

Undeniably, however, it’s a mess. Variations on this mess have presented themselves to humans over tens of thousands of years and over that same period of time humans have made a pretty good hack at untangling it all.

Why bother? Alcohol – that’s why.

Untangling the vines gave us grapes for wine and untangling the quince/apple/pear tree gave us fruit to make cider. In doing so, we’ve forgotten that these plants, their fruit and the wines we make from them aren’t so far apart. So let’s return! Let’s return to a position of alcoholic bilingualism - a possessing of two tongues and therefore two palettes with which we can understand and appreciate cider and wine with parity.

So to begin, let’s go back to the mess we began with:

Vines and trees

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Vines

Grapevines are lianas - climbing vines (much like honeysuckle and common ivy1). Without any inputs from humans, the “goal” of a grapevine is to grow on the forest floor looking to find a tree. Once a tree has been found, the grapevine begins to climb towards the canopy. Up until this point, the vine has produced no grapes and has instead concentrated all its energy on vegetative growth (leaves and shoots).

Once the canopy is reached, there is sunlight to allow the grapes to ripen and there are also birds to eat the grapes and disperse the seeds. Birds that mainly consume fruits do not, in general, have the capacity to break down seeds in their digestive tracts and therefore seed viability is maintained. The seed, famously, contains tannins to also ensure that eating the seed is as unpleasant as possible.

Ever since humans have coexisted with the European grapevine (V. vinifera), mainly around the Mediterranean basin, they have manipulated this plant in several ways:

Ancient grapevines were commonly dioecious, meaning there separate male and female vines (from di-, meaning two, and oikos meaning house. Linnaeus coined the term with the idea of a couple who lives in separate houses in mind). Early cultivators of grapevines managed to selectively breed hemaphroditic vines that were able to self-pollinate.

Humans also bred white grapes which would’ve previously only existed rarely as sport shoots – an individual shoot of a vine showing morphological differences to the rest of the plant due to genetic mutations. If growing up a tree to be eaten by a bird was the goal, it helps to stand out with a nice bright red colour instead of remaining a similar colour to a) the rest of the entirely green canopy and b) unripe grapes with non-viable seeds.

Lastly, humans have brought this process much closer to the ground. The Etruscans, a pre-Roman people that inhabited modern day central Italy, were known for their vite maritate, married vines, where vines would be trained into trees, and sometimes, linked between trees to induce fruiting. This has since been replaced with pruning systems and trellis structures that allow for order in the vineyard making for easier pruning and harvesting etc.

Trees

Fruit trees developed much earlier than grapevines. This shouldn’t come as a surprise when you consider that in order for lianas to evolve their climbing habit, there must be something for them to climb.

Much like grapes, apples rely on frugivores (animals that eat fruits for a majority of their diets) to spread their seed. Unlike grapes, apples will drop once ripe. To prevent apples dropping directly under established trees and creating root competition, apple cores contain compounds that inhibit germination, thus requiring seeds to be eaten/have their cores removed in order to properly germinate.

So, the apple needs to be eaten in order to properly germinate. If it is eaten, it also has the added benefit of being deposited in a turd little parcel of manure to further aid germination.

If only there was a famously gluttonous quadruped roaming about the forests that, despite eating lots of fruit, had teeth that were mainly adapted to tearing flesh and therefore didn’t grind apple seeds thus maintained their viability…

Known for their starring role in such classics as Winnie the Pooh and Paddington it’s bears we have to thank for their work in dispersing seeds.

Bears really pulled their weight in the “eating and shitting” department for millennia in the forests of the Tian Shan mountain range of Southern Kazakhstan, for apples and pears, and the Hyrcanian forest in the case of quinces. Apples and quinces also have the added benefit of floating in water (pears don’t) meaning they can float downstream and widen their genetic pool even further.

Add people to the mix.

Add nomadic people.

Add nomadic people who’ve domesticated nearby horses.

Then, to all that, add the Silk Road, a world famous trade route that just happens to run along the southern edge of the Tian Shan, and people will definitely be needing a snacks with a sufficient shelf life for the journey.

The apples of the wild apple forests of the Tian Shan are, however, not the same species as what we find in our orchards and on our tables today. Europe was home to its own apple. It’s almost always a small, sour, tannic thing: the crabapple. It was likely the Romans that begun cross breading programs between the Kazakh apple, Malus sieversii, and the European crabapple, Malus sylvestris, which gives us the domesticated apple, Malus domestica, that we eat today.

Then it came time to cultivate this tasty, large, apple species with the same order and detail that comes with vines. Traditionally, this would’ve been done on bare rooted trees that grew to full “tree-sized” trees. Whilst a vineyard is cultivated too low to graze large livestock amongst it for most of the year, a full sized apple tree is already adapted to bears needing back rubs, so a herd of cows is hardly a problem.

Large trees, spaciously planted therefore greatly reducing disease pressure and so not needing anything in the way of pesticide application sounds like utopia. Humans, however, cried “more!” and thus dwarfing rootstocks were developed - possibly the only major change to the domesticated apple since it was first bred. Humans could now control the growth, form and vigour of trees allowing for smaller specimens to be packed in at 10x the spacing of a traditional orchard. The individual dwarfed tree producing less but the densely packed field as a whole producing more.

That concludes this whistle stop tour of grapes and trees to vineyards and forests. If you knew all the vine stuff I hope you learned something about apples and vice versa. The focus of the next article will be brought up to the modern day. Focusing on how apples get transformed into cider in the 21st century, how this is similar to wine, how this is different to wine and so on. I hope to see you there.

If you are unfamiliar with Max Riedel, I will have to presume that that is (on balance) quite a good thing. I make this presumption since it means you either a) don’t spend long enough on instagram to dream up long-form opinions about glassmakers or b) are able to resist the urge to spend vast amounts of money on variety specific glassware and decanters that tower over small children (If any of the Riedel marketing team happen to be reading this, rest assured I have no doubt they are all worthwhile purchases)

Reason 1: The fits

I remember watching an episode of revered proselyte of natural wine Clovis Ochin’s series in French on YouTube and seeing a comment that read

“I used to think I didn’t like natural wines. It turns out I don’t like the people who drink them either”.

Phenomenal chat from whoever came up with that one.

Frankly, I don’t blame whoever it was. The start of every episode opens up to Ochin strutting around a warehouse in a backward orange flat cap, two zip hoodies (red underneath, broad navy and white strip on top) finished off with some classic slip-on vans.

It’s a lot to take in. It isn’t made any easier to take in when cuts are then made to Ochin looking like a deer stalker in a wine cellar and Ochin at a party with Action Bronson, all while you are reading the subtitles telling you about “vin vivant”.

Think of it as a sartorial and natural wine slant on Steve Bannon’s “Flood the Scene”.

You’d think I’d be gearing up to claim say that flamboyant outfits and wine content don’t mix, and yet Max Riedel has managed to don some truly trailblazing outfits. He’s also managed to do so whilst still amassing a following of nearly three quarters of a million people.

Personal favourites include a neon orange, corduroy, Montclair button down jacket, a pink, double breasted smoking jacket, and also that one time where he decided to don full Japanese garb and learn how to use a Katana. What can this man not do? He makes Clovis Ochin look like he’s wearing school uniform by comparison, and all he need do is wave some bottles of first growth Bordeaux in our faces and somehow we are none the wiser.

Reason 2: Never a bad word to say

I don’t know if you’ve been following his instagram as much as I have. In all honesty I prefer not to follow Max and instead treat myself to periodic binges to see which bottles of the 1950s and 60s he’s opened up in the month since I last checked in.

but never, and I mean never, has he said that the wine is shit.

This might be unsurprising considering he almost exclusively drinks the likes of Dom P and Petrus. However, this was really made clear when he came up against Elton John’s 0% sparkling wine.

I know you’re going to tell me that he was paid to say what he said. You’re probably right, but he could’ve refused, or just poured himself a glass and said “that’ll do”. Instead unwrapped a bottle from a category of drinks that wine writers love to dump on, he sat down, and respected it as he would any other wine - even taking the time to find out which of his bajillion glasses suits it best.

Reason 3: No A.I.*

Max Riedel probably has loads of money. You can tell just by looking at his hair - a ‘do that is reminiscent of some marquess of a late 18th century European micro state.

He probably also doesn’t have a lot of time. Men who pour champagne onto towers of coupe glasses that they’ve glued to a waiter’s tray whilst wake surfing behind their yacht famously don’t have a lot of time. Yet he doesn’t use A.I. to generate any of his content.

I’ll say it again for the people at the back

He doesn’t use A.I. to generate any of his content

It’s possible I’m alone in arguing for this one, but I really do think that wine content and A.I. content is like mixing water and oil.

Someone’s gone to the hassle of growing grapes for an entire year (growing the vines for longer). They’ve pressed the grapes and allowed various consortia of microbes to ferment it and now you’re going to just plop a little prompt into some A.I. tool and go and relax? Where’s the whole thing about wine being a representation of a time and a place gone? An A.I. image is neither really from a time or a place.

I understand everything today is but vying for attention spans in an ever saturating pool of content, but I’d say if you want to fully respect the work of the winemakers you’re writing about and want your readers to give you the time your asking for, be more like Max.

Glass blowing is just f*cking cool

This is my last point then I’ll stop gushing, I promise.

Arguably this is less about Max himself but we must remember that he is the rep of his brand. Glass blowing is one of the coolest things to see. Working a second order phase transition material (ie something that has an intermediate, ‘sticky’, phase when melting instead of liquifying like water or metal) has probably mesmerised those who observe it being done since human’s understood how to work glass.

Add to that that Riedel employs these Jeff Woad type characters, with sleeveless shirts and massive metal necklaces that look like a clamp for a car wheel, and its probably some of the best stuff you can find on Instagram. As I mentioned, I don’t have any Riedel products. I wouldn’t trust myself with a decanter of his either.

One last thing

let’s just appreciate the way he pronounces aeration. We are talking about the top dog of all things wine glasses here. Mr Decanter Supreme. He does not say “air-RAY-shun” but instead opts for “air-REE-ay-shun”. So don’t start accusing people of not knowing anything about a subject just because they pronounced something wrong. It clearly doesn’t matter that much.

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I had this article in my drafts before Joe Fattorini recently interviewed him for his podcast but didn’t know when to release it. If you wan’t to see a more serious and educational side of the man, I would recommend watching it:

The main actors in the scene are: a glass of wine, two tasters of differing abilities and an unhelpful dose of awkward silence. It plays out across lunches, dinners and tastings in restaurants, kitchens and tasting rooms around the world.

Taster A (less experienced) lifts glass to nose: Oh, this smells familiar. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Its? long pause I’m not sure

Taster B (more experienced): go on, what do you think?

A: Strawberries?

B: (with remarkable authority considering they had just spoken at length about how you “couldn’t buy a sense of smell”): No, no. Its cherries. It’s cherries and roses, not strawberries.

explanation about the wine ensues. All failed attempts at guessing the smell correctly slowly fade away…

The opening of my article on recoding cider referenced the language we use to described orange wines and the language philosophy of Wittgenstein. Though I don’t want to write some navel-gazing philosophical article on philosophy, I do think that the philosophy of language or, more generally, the way in which we use language deserves more time spent on it.

Whilst being able to blind taste a wine and accurately deduce where its from and what it is is little more than a party trick (a very impressive one nonetheless), being able to accurately describe what you like in relation to wine is a far more useful skill.

Accuracy of description in this context, as I will explain, is more about mutual understanding of terms over outright technical accuracy. Announcing you like wines with high levels of rotundone to the person behind the counter at your wineshop might be technically more accurate than saying you like “peppery wines” but this accuracy comes at a neglect for the fact that you are engaged in an information transaction where mutual understanding is the priority.

This is, hopefully unsurprisingly, what language is for. For the most part, English is pretty good at fulfilling this role - at facilitating communication.

There is, however, a problem:

In English, there are very few words dedicated to the description of flavour (and even fewer for aroma).

The main dedicated words in English are for the 5 tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami. It is very indicative of linguistic deficiency that a sentence with “words in English” includes a Japanese term.

All these words are dedicated to the description of specific stimuli and do not rely on the invocation of another sense in order to convey their meaning. Much like trying to make primary colours by mixing other paints, trying to describe what you’re actually tasting when your tasting, say, sweetness is impossible – unless you want to go into descriptions of GPCRs and how taste works but I don’t think that would serve you any better.

The language that is used for olfaction (smelling) is no better. Unlike flavour, there are no “primary smells” in the same sense of the 5 tastes and so sight is relied upon much for heavily. English olfactory vocabulary is essentially split in two, source-based and evaluative e.g. grassy/fishy/smells like feet for the former and fragrant/rancid/pungent for the latter.

Most words used for flavour in the English language also rely instead on sight - and this is where difficulty arises. Taste and smell are so instinctively predicated on sight that when the visual cue is removed, when someone is smelling a wine that contains the same aroma compounds as elderflower but don’t have the visual stimulus before them, they instantly come down with a case of “I recognise this smell but I can’t quite put my finger on it”. Then show them some pictures of flowers one of which is elderflower, and they will pick it out with confidence.

Chris Van Tulleken demonstrated this reliance of taste on sight very well in his Royal Institute Christmas lectures in 2024, giving the audience banana flavoured jelly beans whilst showing them a picture of pears and them all saying they were tasting pear, not banana.

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Umami (and Kokumi), where language gives up

At risk of passing off individual experience as universal, I remember when everyone started talking about umami and not having a clue what it really was. There was mention of “savouriness” and “meatiness without the meat” but it was only when I dipped my finger into a packet of MSG (a highly recommended experience) did it become clear.

An added difficulty for describing umami in the context of western cuisines is that it is never purposefully added to dishes. Sure, tomatoes, anchovies, aged cheeses and Worcestershire sauce all have the necessary peptides to deliver umami but that is never the primary motivation for their addition. If tomatoes are only ever added for their tomatoeyness (colour, acidity, sweetness, texture) then of course, linguistically we will never develop a need to describe that “somethingelseness” about them - thus we loan a word from a culture that does describe that.

We might soon be approaching a similar situation with yet another Japanese word: Kokumi.

Having been to lectures given by Danish flavour scientists, read what Harold McGee has to say and asked my taste science professor at university what it is, I am none the wiser.

If you’re interested, you can read this note about Kokumi by . I think it perfectly sums up English language deficiency when it comes to taste. A chef, writer and content creator as established as Sam, can only take us so far in his description (which, contrary to what he writes, I do not think clarifies anything)

To clarify this is different from umami, which makes food taste savoury. Kokumi makes food feel satisfying.

Despite the association that a “good taster” is one who is able to accurately deduce what fruits and flowers they are smelling, the bulk of wine’s unique language is for describing flaws, not any desired aromas/flavours. TCA (cork taint), mousiness, V.A. and Brett in particular all describe specific smells that don’t rely on sight.

However, all of these words for faults are closer to diagnoses than they are descriptions. To use the example of the sense of sight, diagnosing a flaw is much closer to being able to deduce that a painter is using oil paint instead of watercolour, where describing a wine as “cherry on the nose” is closer to differentiating the different tones of the painting.

Mousiness still presents an interesting example since it is a word that derives neither from the source of the flaw (e.g. TCA, Brettanomyces)1 nor does it outright describe the sensation (i.e. volatile acidity) - it stands alone as a word dedicated to specific stimulus. It’s still not particular useful however, aside from the fact that perception relies on individual mouth pH, at the end of the day it is still a word for a flaw. It might be far more specific and exacting than descriptors like balsamic/cherry/green but nobody in their right mind would go into a wine shop and ask for a mousy wine.

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Playing the game

Language is a game. The language used for wine is its own game within that. Playing the wine game outside of the context would be to stand, green banana in hand, gently sniffing it before taking a bite and extolling the virtues of the banana’s “fine tannins”. That would be insane. Repeat with a glass of wine and this becomes normalised.

Within this game, its important to point out something that seldom gets acknowledged outright with regard to speech: Words are defined by their usage, not by their dictionary definition.

“Aromatic” and “mineral” are both interesting examples of this. “Aromatic”, outside of chemistry labs, refers to anything that has an aroma and yet in wine it is used to differentiate between “aromatic” and “non-aromatic” grape varieties (e.g. Gewürztraminer and Chardonnay respectively) despite all grapes having an aroma. Is that wrong by its dictionary definition - kind of? yet it still used and accepted.

On the flip side, “mineral” has come to represent a general collection of smells, tastes and mouthfeels that often said to have come from the rocks that the grapes have been grown on. Consistently proved wrong ( provides a great breakdown here) and yet still used but not without a heavy serving of pushback from some people due to inaccuracy.

I understand why there is pushback. “mineral” is in a similar camp to “natural” in the sense that, unlike “aromatic” their usage implies more than just the presence of a characteristic in a wine – i.e. that a wine has a higher mineral content or that a wine is more natural than another2.

Is it inherently wrong to use them? It’s hard to say. Their use in communication certainly seems to serve a purpose to certain degree but at the same time they carry unhelpful/confusing implications.

A lot of these terms were developed for education and consumer focus group purposes hence they needn’t pass muster for any scientific accuracy.

The wine aroma wheel you have blu tac’d to your kitchen wall is a product of the desire to describe wines in a such a way that there is mutual understanding, not pinpoint accuracy or correct identification on a chemical level. It has been honed, over the past century or so, so that people can be delivered a standardised wine education allowing them to taste wine to a given standard and to facilitate market research allowing focus groups to communicate “what the consumer wants” during product trials.

Take that away and you are in the Wild West of Wine description. There’s tumbleweeds rolling through the main square of the town where a group has gathered to battle it out over whether to call it Orange wine or Amber wine or Macerated wine or S**n-C****t wine.

Their guns are in their holsters.

It’s a Mexican standoff.

A bead of sweat rolls down one of their foreheads…

…until someone can be overheard in the nearby natty wine bar asking for a glass of something “quite natural but not too funky but still with a bit of funk” and all of a sudden they seem to have bigger priorities…

Point being, tasting a wine isn’t as daunting as we think but describing it is probably far more challenging than we realise. When you feel like you recognise a smell or a taste in wine but ‘can’t put your finger on it’ (a hugely ironic idiom considering fingers are neither used in taste nor smell) remember that is not your sense of taste or smell that is the problem, it the very language/tools you are using to describe it.

Describing wine is like trying to thread a needle with oven gloves on. You can perceive the required specificity but you simply don’t have the tools available to you to do it justice

One last thing

In spite of the fact I’ve spent a fair portion of this article arguing that words are defined by use and not by definition, I do have a bone to pick with one specific term that crops up in descriptions of wine all too often:

…notes of cider…

No. It doesn’t. Your wine doesn’t taste of cider. That’s about as accurate as saying the weather on your birthday is going to be “very Tuesday”.

It is likely the mass produced “cider” that is made engineered to hit just one tasting note, that being:

• Apple

that is likely responsible for the frequency of cider as a tasting note. However, it has just become lazy shorthand for wines (very often, though not always pet-nats) that are some combination of cloudy, high in malic acid, coarse tannins, “fruity” and possibly the product of a fermentation that could be a bit cleaner.

Aside from being vague/unspecific, it does a huge injustice to the work of phenomenal cider makers (who I will eventually get round to covering in more depth) who, just like great winemakers, task themselves every year with making their best representation of time and place out of the fruit they work their magic on. Your use of the word cider isn’t changing year on year but the cider that is being made is - something isn’t right

Further reading/watching:

Bold’. ‘Elegant’. ‘Introverted’? How words describing wine get lost in translation by Allison Creed PhD

Cultural differences in wine flavour perception by Sietze Wijma

To see the full article, please click ‘view in browser’ as this article may be trimmed by your email provider

Go to your preferred wine guide/encyclopedia/atlas and turn to page (more likely a short paragraph) dedicated to Dolcetto. It is highly likely you will read some variation on the following theme:

“don’t be put off by the name, although Dolcetto translates to ‘little sweet one’ (how cute), it’s wines are fermented dry and never sweet”

An interesting story…

Does it make sense that a Piemontese grape variety first attested to in the 16th century would have an Italian name; a name in a language only widespread in the region from the late 19th century?

No.

Does it make sense that a grape that has no historical evidence1 of being vinified as a sweet wine would take its name from its sweetness?

Also no.

And yet Jancis Robinson MW (and Julia Harding), Nicolas Belfrage MW, Wine Folly, Wine Enthusiast and at least 5 other articles I found on substack all fall foul of the same mistake.

For those who aren’t familiar, in Piemonte there exists a triptych of grape varieties that maintain dominance over all the others.

Nebbiolo is the kind of absolute monarch of the three. Primarily known for its star role in classics such as The road to Barolo and Citizen Barbaresco. Highest in tannin of the three, highest in acidity of the three and comfortably the most prestigious. “Tar and violets/roses” seems to be a collectively agreed upon as the general tasting note for Nebb, irrespective of how accurate this might actually be.

Next comes the President character: Barbera (all anthropomorphisms beyond this point are purely my own). High acidity, low tannins, slightly darker colour than Nebbiolo. Despite having “let the side down” in the 1980s when people added methanol (poison) to meet demand for a booming Italian wine market, it has firmly returned to prominence in the hands of several passionate and skilful producers.

Then we have the lowly alderman2 of the three, the ‘wine of the people’: Dolcetto. High (ish) in tannin, lower in acidity and more or less the same tint as Barbera. A lot of Nebbiolo is sold abroad but what you are most likely to find at Piemontese lunch and dinner tables is a bottle of Dolcetto. Maligned internationally, seldom respected or given its due diligence. Really its the bangers and mash of Piemontese wine but that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t know about the virtues of other worldly bangers with stupendous mash.

Its time to sing the praises of Dolcetto.

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Let’s start with getting the name right:

Dolcetto does not come from Dolce (sweet) + -etto (small) but instead comes from the Piemontese word düsset or dösset - the “hump” (dosso in Italian) of the tops of the hills of the Langhe (Langhe being another local term for hills).

Dolcetto, being the earliest ripening of its accomplices, Nebbiolo and Barbera, is well suited to the highest part, the hump, of the hill where the colder conditions would push the likes of Nebbiolo to the point where it might never ripen at all.

Much like Nebbiolo growing in la nebbia, the fog, (la nebia in Piemontese) it makes sense that Dolcetto would also take its name from where it grows: it is l’uva del dösset or the grape of the hump of the hill and thus becomes cognate in Italian as Dolcetto

Even Ian D’Agata, the detective hero of Italian wine, writes in his book Native Grapes of Italy:

Dolcetto (from dolce or douce, sweet, in reference to the sweet grapes, not the wine).

Another problem with this theory is the fact that all grapes are fruits and therefore are sweet. Naming a wine after the grape’s sweetness would justify calling literally every single grape variety Dolcetto.

I’ll admit that I’ve never tried a fresh Dolcetto grape. Neither have I tried Barbera or Nebbiolo straight from the vine but even by Ian’s own admission:

The fully ripe berries really are sweet, just as you’d expect given Dolcetto’s name, but ironically, I find they’re less sweet than those of Barbera

Ian? Come on Ian! What are you talking about Ian!?? You’ve just undermined your own argument. “Dolcetto from sweet in reference to the grapes but they’re less sweet than other grape varieties”. How does that make any sense Ian??

I get it, it’s much easier to go with the whole “dolce = sweet” etymology instead of “dösset = dosso = dolcetto = grape on the hump of the hill”. One of those etyma requires only a basic knowledge of latinate languages to get the inference of ‘little sweet one’. The other involves an explanation Italian linguistic diversity and harvest times and berry ripeness and so on.

But now you know. So use this information to be absolutely insufferable at a wine event/dinner wisely.

There’s Dolcetto then there’s Dolcetto

With the three varieties of Dolcetto, Barbera and Nebbiolo comes a financial model that is baked into much of Piemonte. Dolcetto is harvested first, then Barbera, then Nebbiolo, with about 2 weeks between each.

This means that Dolcetto gets a head start in fermentation and historically could’ve been bottled before Nebbiolo had barely begun fermentation. I don’t know if climate change still permits for such a system but one thing remains: it seems like a fair few wineries don’t really put much care into their dolcetto and just like a bit of cashflow before they wait 5 years for their Barolo to come on the market.

Obviously, that’s a generalisation. However, for the unknowing eye there is little to indicate as to whether a bottle of Dolcetto has been made with time, care and passion or whether it has been splashed in a tank and been told to get a wiggle on with its fermentation - leading to aggressively diplomatic/unintersting drinking experiences

Through unscientific research I have found Dolcetto can be divided into three camps

1. The hurried

I’ve already spoken about these folks but I won’t be naming names. They are making wine for picnics, big family lunches and food festivals where you just need bottles on the table that seem to never disappear - fair enough, someone’s got to do it. If you pick up a bottle for less than €8 or £12 after reading this article you might be in this camp so you might want to lower expectations accordingly.

2. The “second/third Wines”

Barolo being Barolo there are many producers who have earned their space on wine lists due to the fact they produce Nebbiolo of galactic quality. Often, these bottles come at exclusive prices but thankfully they are not the only wines made by producer. Barbera and Dolcetto are the seconds and thirds, some wineries also make a Freisa or even an Arneis or other white to try and round out their lineup.

Much in the same way that Salvador Dalì designed the logo for Chupa Chups or the fact that they sell fridge magnets with the Mona Lisa on them at the Louvre gift shop, the lesser wines of these producer allows us to get a feel of their production albeit without paying top dollar but also without really experiencing the true magic they work.

Though they are still works of art and great wines in their own right, the issues come when their raison d’être gets a bit lost in translation when they arrive on international wine lists. For example, comparing prices across a Piemontese and a London wine list3, Olek Bondonio (very good producer, though not a “household name”) gets a 2x markup put on his Langhe Nebbiolo from Piemonte to London.

Similarly, with everyone wanting to get their hands on wines from Philine Isabelle, her Barbera has the same markup from Piemonte to London.

Conterno Fantino’s entry level Nebbiolo Ginestrino, what they refer to as their ‘baby Barolo’, is also a similar story.

On the other hand, a big name like Giuseppe Rinaldi, who’s Barolo would easily see a price tag of +£400, has a more than 5x markup on their Dolcetto, being listed at €24 in Piemonte and £114 in London. It is only human to raise your expectation with a 5x markup on a wine and I can confidently say that this is a wine that will not meet it. I’m not saying it’s a bad wine at all, at €24 its a great wine - its position in a wine list has, however, got lost in translation.

Point being: pay Mona Lisa prices for a fridge magnet and you will be sad. Pay fridge magnet prices for a fridge magnet and you will be happy.

3. The passionate

Thankfully, there are some places that never got the whole “Barolo is King” BS memo. Instead of thinking “let’s plant Dolcetto where Nebbiolo doesn’t ripen” they flip the hierarchy on its head and instead reserve the best sites for Dolcetto. Much like Barolo is never labelled as Nebbiolo di Barolo, Dogliani, Ovada and Diano d’Alba DOCGs have all begun shedding their Dolcetto di _____” monikers, so keep an eye out for that.

I’ll happily admit I’m biased toward the wines of Dogliani. Going back to the bangers and mash analogy, these wines are no chipolatas.

You can still have the wines made by the winery that was set up by the first democratically elected president of the Italian Republic, Luigi Einaudi, there. I’ve written about the quasi-religious act of making tripe soup there and the “what grows together goes together” aphorism definitely still checks out. There’s producers to suit everyone’s tastes here:

Though Tommaso Cappa vinifies his wines in stainless steel and concrete, I was shocked by how expressive and open his Dogliani is. Clearly someone who knows what he’s doing (he’s a vine specialist at Ceretto) but isn’t afraid to wander from tradition and make sparkling Dolcetto rosé and call it “Sa di cool” (tastes cool) as well

Cascina Corte treads the line between tradition and experimentation incredibly well. They produce 3 Dolcettos in total, one classic (red label), an old vine single vineyard bottling (green) and the same vineyard plot but vinified in amphora (white). Do I think the increase in price from the classic up to the single vineyard plots is worth it? Not really, but it’s an interesting learning experience and they are lovely people so why not. Distributed by Eataly (in the UK at least), their wines are a picturesque postcard of a lovely couple making lovely wines in their lovely house.

Marziano Abbona’s Papà Celso deserves a mention for holding the Dolcetto fort for many wine lists around. Another classic, though their real magic is Abbona’s Cinerino Langhe Bianco - a Piemontese Viognier that sings of orange blossom.

Valletti and Francesco Boschis both hold plots on the Pianezzo cru sight. Without getting into the weeds about the cru sites of Dogliani, Pianezzo is amongst the highest and therefore can deliver the acidity that Dolcetto sometimes lacks (and one of the reasons people don’t give it as much thought as they should)

San Fereolo - some people refer to her wines as “baby Barolo”. Hopefully that rather demeaning label dissolves on contact with your first sniff of this wine in all its rich, leathery, savoury tones. Besides, its written on the label “In this bottle, you will find, brought back to light after years of darkness and silence, the unyielding dialogue between time and matter in a physic wine – a nature of which we are a part and from which we could never be separated”. A phenomenal wine, should you be able to get your hands on it…

In Ovada there is Borgatta (unclear if his wines are still certified within the DOC), mentioned recently in ’s great write up of VinNatur - sounds like a cool couple, they make a damn cool wine. Maybe not for those who don’t like any VA in their wines but it does help to balance Dolcetto’s natural lack of acidity in this case.

Further afield, there is also Dolcetto d’Alba and d’Asti. Fabio Gea’s Pinotto and Pino have a similar mission statement to San Fereolo. (Is his label a scythe and a sickle, or is it an abstract interpretation of his bum?)

He doesn’t sell his wines in the Langhe as he demands delivering them by horse and cart, stating explicitly that if he were to arrive at wherever wanted to stock them and he didn’t find any hay for his horse, he would turn around without stopping (though it is unclear if he owns a horse, or indeed, a cart). Imported by Gergovie wines in UK though if you are concerned about low sulphur wines and transportation, Acini wine shop in Cuneo is definitely a spot to go in Piemonte

The Piemontese Dolcetto-heads (?) probably wouldn’t let me get away without mentioning Cascina Penna-Currado, which turned heads after being rated 93 points by Wine Front (not that I’m a huge believer in scores but any sign of love for the underdog is always welcome). Luca Currado Vietti and Elena Penna (of Vietti big boy Barolo fame) decided to not go into retirement and set up their own project instead. So far with two Nebbiolos, a Dolcetto, Barbera and a Timorasso it seems like it’s going great and I have also heard rumours about the Barolo to come. Since its a new project its not so ubiquitous in wine shops but I’m sure that will change since my oh my this dolcetto is probably one of the most perfumed I had ever tasted - reminiscent of a tea-fanatic making you try some strange stuff they’ve bought back from a trip to china when all you’d ever drank was PG Tips.

(4. Bricco del Drago)

For many reasons, Bricco del Drago gets its own category. Produced by Poderi Colla since 1969, the original owner of Bricco del Drago (the dragon hill) realised that the Dolcetto grown there was quite different. To give it a bit of finesse they decided to add a small bit of Nebbiolo to make what used to be called Dolcetto Nebbiolato or Nebbiolated Dolcetto in English - 85% Dolcetto and 15% Nebbiolo. In 1987 it was given its own presidential decree making it the first “Super Vino da Tavola”4. A perfect wine for coaxing even the most ardent of Nebb-heads out of their stupor.

Now you are equipped with a selection of some very interesting Dolcetto. The last thing to look out for that could be of interest is Ormeasco di Pornassio DOC. Ligurian Dolcetto but here known as Ormeasco (from the town of Ormea) instead of Dolcetto. The appellation also includes rosè wines with the beautiful name of Sciac-trà (shak-TRA) meaning squeeze-pull in the Ligure language to reflect the quick time spent in the press. Rarely seen outside of the region and is mostly made from a distinct biotype of Dolcetto known as Nibiö - slightly more structured and authoritative than its classic Piemontese counterpart (though some Piemontese producers do have small parcels of it).

//Post script nugget of information that feels necessary to add to a dolcetto article but I haven’t researched it enough/this article is already long enough: The oldest dolcetto vines in the world are in Australia. Best’s Great Western planted them in the 1866 thinking they were Malbec and it was only until the 1980s that they were correctly identified as Dolcetto (though doubts had already been raised about not being Malbec decades earlier). I’ve never had a bottle as it doesn’t seem to be imported anywhere in Europe.

In her 1978 essay On Photography, Susan Sontag opened with the following characterisation of photography:

Even without extending the metaphor of viticulture, the growing of grapes, being its own form of photo-graphy, making an imprint, or graph, of the sunlight provided by a growing season, its clear to see how this characterisation of photography is a near perfect match to wine making (or indeed any other form of fermentation).

To make wine is to appropriate not only grapes but the microbial life growing on, in, and around the grapes and winery. In making wine, the winemaker puts themselves in a certain relation with the world based on their knowledge of how they believe things should be.

What I want to focus on today, however, is not the different philosophies of winemakers, but instead to take a step back from the winemaking, to turn to the vineyard and then take a further step back to examine the effects on the surrounding ecology. Before I get deep into that, I would just like to say that this article is based on my experiences of Piemontese vineyards and discussions/conjecture shared with Italian ethnobotanists (ie not peer-reviewed study)

The map above shows the primary and old-growth forests that remain in Europe. Aside from coming with a whole hoard of ecological issues, the lack of primary old-growth forests in Europe still offers an interesting perspective on nature: what isn’t primary is the result of human influence on the landscape.

In the same way reading into the behaviours of humans tells us who or what they have been influenced by, reading into landscape ecology tells us how the land has been used.

When visiting a vineyard, it is quite easy to read this landscape, there are…

…vines. Obviously. Someone wanted to grapes and therefore planted vines to supply them with grapes. So far, so good.

But until recently, vines did not arrive in the vineyard alone. Instead, they came with a supporting band of other plants that facilitated the creation of the vineyard.

Giant cane (Arundo donax)

Vines are lianas, climbing plants that evolved to use trees as structural support - spreading to the top of the canopy where they produce fruit in hope that a bird will come along and eat it to further proliferate the species.

On the Italian peninsula, the Etruscans were known to train their vines using the system called married vines, where vines would be trained up fruit trees thus removing the any need for additional supports or trellis.

With the development of the concept of the vineyard, helped by training systems and vine management techniques that stress the vine into thinking it is at the top of the canopy and therefore fruiting at knee height, comes the desire for each vine to have its own post.

Enter Arundo donax, known by many names but i’ll go with the rather uninspiring “Giant cane” today. Not originally native to the northern coast of the mediterranean but still present enough in “the olden days” for it to be given the name Arundo donax, respectively the old latin and greek words for “reed”.

Driving around the Langhe, it is quite common to see these big clumps of something that looks halfway between bamboo and maize. Still present in some of the tiny vineyard parcels with old owners, it has largely been replaced by plastic poles hence seemingly abandoned large clumps that are left to grow by the road.

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White willow (Salix alba)

We have our imaginary vines growing on our imaginary cane supports, but there is nothing to tie them to these supports. Enter Salix alba, white willow, a fast growing, shade intolerant tree that responds very well to coppicing (cutting the whole tree down and then harvesting the shoots that are pushed up in subsequent years).

The uses of white willow stretch far beyond those of Giant cane and as such remains more common in the whole of Piemonte, even if it isn't traditionally managed anymore. Travelling across much of the flat, fertile, plains of the region, it is very common to see pollarded willow stumps looking like big fists with branches coming out of them. Leaves for livestock forage, shoots for weaving any sort of basket that was needed. On top of that, willow contains salicylic acid, a precursor to aspirin, and therefore can be applied in the vineyard to aid with disease resistance.

False acacia/Black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia)

If you travel around Piemonte in the beginning of May, there will also be an abundance of white, wisteria-esque, flowers on densely growing trees in the uncultivated parts of wine areas and at the edges of arable fields.

Black locust is not a native plant, nor is it particular easy to get rid of. Its ubiquitous presence in Piemonte always puzzled me - what is this plant doing here? Sure, it might be great firewood but are many of the native trees like oak and ash. Perhaps the Piemontese were drawn to its UV-fluorescent timber? I doubt it. It is not particularly ‘fun’ to manage (if, indeed you can refer to the management of any tree as fun) due to the fact that young growth grows long spikes as defence against grazing.

It was only when I discovered its unusually strong rot-resistance did things start to fall into place; trellis systems for vineyards are expensive pieces of infrastructure and the last thing you want to be doing is having to replace end posts as they have rotted. Before the invention of agrochemicals (ie creosote), the best way to maximise longevity of vineyard infrastructure was through careful selection of timber to prevent against decay.

I’m sure this tree’s other qualities helped it proliferate, but perhaps it would not be so prolific around vineyards were it not for its rot resistant capability.

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Pokeweed/Polkweed (Phytolacca Americana)

So far, all the plants mentioned play an obvious role in the vineyard.

What, then, links a non-native, highly toxic plant to the proliferation of vineyards?

Well, the berries of the plant, the pokeberries, are the least toxic part of the plant after the leaves, shoots and roots in order of increasing toxicity. Whilst it still isn’t recommended to eat them, they have such a strong colour that only a few are needed to make, say, a pink pannacotta.

Ok. That explains why it might be used for pannacotta, but wine?

The ethnobotany professor at my university said that Pokeweed is, in Italy, most prevalent in Piemonte and Tuscany.

Two regions that coincidentally make wines of international regard

Two regions that coincidentally make these wines with thin-skinned, light coloured varieties.

Thus two areas were the colours of their prized wines could do with some adulteration when it came to their colour.

Now, before I get any complaints from winemakers accusing me of slander that I am telling people that Nebbiolo and Sangiovese is poisonous, it’s worth pointing out that this (obviously) no longer happens. Whilst there may be little to no evidence of pokeberries being added to wine, there are two other cases which I would argue support the case.

Portugal was ruled by despot Marquis of Pombal from the mid to late 18th century, during which time he banned Elder (Sambucus nigra) and demand people chop all elder shrubs down. The motive behind this was a suspicion he had that winemakers were adding elderberries to lighter wines to increase their colour for export, something he worried would tarnish the name of Portuguese wine if international markets were to know they weren’t drinking wine purely from grapes.

Italy is no stranger to poisonous adjuncts in wine either. The 1978 methanol scandal lead to almost thirty people loosing their lives as methanol was being added to wines in order augment yields to match demand.

And lastly, for those who, like me, think “but why would a darker wine be thought of as any better instead of just different?” I guess it’s a similar exploitation to people perceiving wine as higher quality because its in a heavier bottle.

When the vineyard stops being a vineyard

The relevance of all of this, the reason why I thought it deserved an article, is the trend in some of the wine industry that is leading to vineyards being ripped out.

Almost nobody uses all of the plants as I have suggested them to be used in this article. Now there are concrete posts with wires strung between them that the vines are attached to with plastic. All of these materials were championed because of their hard wearing nature. No more rotting posts, cracking willow ties, or waiting for trees to grow the right size to turn them into replacement posts.

However, as vineyards are ripped out around the world, as land is unappropriated, the vineyard structure that supported its function is no longer returned to the soil and instead stands as an epitaph in the form of a pile of concrete, wire and galvanised posts.

For today’s article, I’m moving away from the wines of Roero and Piemonte1 to introduce another side of Things in Bottles. A few weeks ago, I read ’s article “Recoding orange wine,” arguing for the realigning of the term orange wine away from its current cultural connotations and baggage, back to a general term to describe the process/tradition of extended macerations of white grapes. On a similar “linguistics and orange wine” level, ’s “Don’t F***ing call it skin-contact” was another great article.

There are no historical references to Ludwig Wittgenstein being a fan of skin-contact orange wines. Indeed, most sources describe him as having a quasi-monastic approach to gastronomy. However, if he was still alive (and maybe even writing a substack), as a philosopher of language I’m sure he would have been interested in people trying to reject the meaning of a word being defined by its use in specific contexts rather than what it exactly refers to.

That is a rather arsey way to say that, aside from them being great articles, they are both arguing for a general restructuring of some of the language we use to describe certain wines. Landa thinks that orange wine has become too specific a term, lending itself to lazy use and misunderstanding, when really it should occupy a similar space as red, white, or rose, none of which carry as much baggage. Similarly, Woolf thinks skin-contact is incorrectly used as synonymous with orange on wine lists when the real definition of skin-contact would also include red and rosé.

Both articles, whether or not you agree with them, highlight a general linguistic deficiency that we have in English for describing such topics. So, whilst we’re at it, I’d also like to propose a term that needs rethinking/redefining or, as Landa puts it, Recoding.

The term in question is Cider.

Cider’s recoding needs to be quite an intensive surgery. Much needs to be removed, replaced, rejigged, moved around for the term to be of any use. I don’t think any of these actions will come from a single group of people, so the more that are aware, the better.

To show why I think cider needs recoding, let’s start off with a general outline of wine:

The product of a single, yearly, harvest of grapes, pressed and fermented. The conditions in that year leading up to that harvest dictate a large part of what the wine is like in that year. Beyond the grape variety, that after its planting can’t really be considered a “variable,” the rest of the deciding force of what that wine will be in that year is up to the people working at the winery/vineyard to decide how and what they are going to produce.

Now, let’s look at what the outline of cider would be if it has been recoded:

The product of a single, yearly, harvest of apples, pressed and fermented. The conditions in that year leading up to that harvest dictate a large part of what the cider is like in that year. Beyond the variety of apple, that after its planting can’t really be considered a “variable,” the rest of the deciding force of what that cider will be in that year is up to the people working at the cider/orchard to decide how and what they are going to produce.

Where’s the problem?

If you noticed the fact that my outline of cider is what it would be as opposed to what it is then it will come as no surprise that what I’ve outlined above is actually a far cry from where the legal definition of cider stands.

If you haven’t seen the below image printed out and blu tac’d onto the wall/window of a natural wine bar, it lists the authorised products that can go into wine depending on what certification (if any at all) it is made in accordance to:

Some people, understandably, don’t like the idea of making wine by adding a bunch of stuff into it that isn’t grapes. Whether or not you are one of these people, I think you can still agree on one fundamental principle: even if you add whatever cocktail of additives to your wine, it should still be primarily made out of grapes.

Somehow in the cider world that message hasn’t got through. There would be a slightly easier, though still quite difficult, argument to make if the limit was at 50 or 51%, but it’s not. It’s

all

the

way

down

at 35%

And that isn’t even the last of it!

The 35% can all come from concentrate!

This means that since the law mandates only a starting sugar level of this “juice,” industrial producers can concentrate their juice and then add back in more water than they ever took out.

I’ll just write that in bold so that the people who skim read this articles still get the message:

For cider to be considered “cider” it only needs to contain 35% apple juice

Say it with me reader:

What the fuck is going on!

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This is where the recoding needs to start. Increasing that 35% to even 50% or, dare I say it 51%, would be a step in the right direction. Thankfully, the wheels have already been set in motion for this, but my god have they been met with resistance.

The team at Redvers, a small producer in Herefordshire using only 100%, wrote to their MP, Ellie Chowns, last year to call for change. They argue that this low 35% threshold was damaging both to producers of 100% cider and also to traditional orchards - planted on standard rootstocks with canopies high enough to graze livestock underneath.

Ellie Chowns submitted a written question on raising the 35% limit to 50% and got this as a response from Dame Angela Eagle, the minister for food security and rural affairs:

“Not what consumers in the UK would expect”

I’m aware that neither personal experience nor anecdotal experience are “consumer” experience, so I won’t pass them off as such. Instead, lets have a look at some cider advertising, which also relies on “consumer expectation”

For £11.99 (shipping not included) you can buy yourself a Inch’s Cider pint glass on Amazon.

On the front of the glass, in very clear writing, outlined clearly so that all the “consumers” can see it, it says “100% British Apples”

As is customary in the UK, ingredients lists are written in order of how much of the product is made up of each ingredient. If, as they claim, Inch’s is “100% British Apples” the ingredients list should read as follows:

• Apple Juice

• Maybe some other bits and bobs like sulphites

And nothing else.

But it doesn’t. Instead, the ingredients list for Inch’s cider reads

• Water

• Apple juice

• All the other bits and bobs like sulphites

How is this possible?

How can a product that is “100% British apples” contain more water than it does apples? What is the “consumer” supposed to “expect”?

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“100% British apples” is a claim about Britishness and not about appleness

Heineken, the owner of Inch’s, doesn’t disclose the juice content of their cider.

I would nonetheless argue that writing “100% British Apples” surrounded by hundreds of apples and no Union Jack’s is playing on “consumer expectation” that the product is made of 100% apples and not that its 100% British.

Why should I care?

Another thing to make clear is that whilst the legal threshold is only 35% juice, there is still a strong collection of producers in the UK that stick to producing their ciders and their perries with 100% juice. The problem is that they have no legal protection above the 35% threshold.

I’m not arguing that a beverage made from 35% juice shouldn’t exist. I’m arguing that this beverage is in no way deserving of the title Cider. Call it something else instead like “alcoholic apple drink”.

To really answer the question of why should I care? there are thousands of answers. If you like drinking natural/authentic wines because you like drinking products that are born of people’s love of their land and their fermented craft then you should care about protecting these producers.

If you care about halting the normalisation of blanket pesticide use in agriculture then you should care. Where intensive orchards (the sort that Heineken felled 300 acres worth of a few years ago) need intensive spraying in order to manage diseases, traditional orchards are planted on standard rootstocks and grow to such a height that they support the grazing of livestock underneath them and need no spraying at all.

If you care about agricultural integrity, greenwashing, FARMWASHING, or British food sovereignty you should care. Alongside allowing all the apple juice to be concentrated in the production of “cider,” there is no required declaration of the origin of this apple juice concentrate. Plenty of the apple juice concentrate used for cider produced and sold in the UK comes from Eastern Europe. I have nothing against Eastern Europe or Eastern European apples, but if your whole brand image is centred on being British and cider’s inherent British symbolism, I want it to be grown in Britain!

Sure, it might seem like a fool’s errand to get caught up on this sort of thing, but when we stop caring about these things, we let down our guard on the rest of our food traditions. It is these food traditions, these traditional agricultural practices, ways of life, landscapes and economies that function as the connection between ourselves and our land. Without them, there is nothing stopping us from being anybody anywhere. As I have written before on here, when you enter into a British supermarket, you are neither in a time nor a place. Instead, you find yourself in a plastic wrapped selection of fruits and vegetables that are devoid of any seasonal or geographic changes, no matter where you go. Consuming anything that it is domestically produced, wherever you may live, is really what it means to be of a place; not just living in a place but living through a place in all its seasons and climates and traditions.

Further Reading:

Thirst Behavior

Recoding Orange Wine

Thirst Behavior is a project about wine, taste, and the social performances that form around them, the rituals of enjoyment shaped by status, media, money, and desire. Wine is the entry point; the real subject is how taste gets made, circulated, and contested, especially in New York and the Hamptons, where leisure and tastemaking overlap most visibly…

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5 months ago · 23 likes · 3 comments

The Morning Claret

Don't F***ing Call it Skin Contact!

I’ll never forget the 2005 episode of Family Guy where Peter gets his own talk show, What Really Grinds My Gears. It’s launched a million memes, I just made that a million and one…

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5 months ago · 25 likes · 47 comments · Simon J Woolf

Alcoholic Products Technical Guide Section 2.2 stating what is legally defined as “cider” and “Perry” in the UK

Cider Review in general – specifically this article by Adam Wells which is far more well mannered and less ranting in its demeanour

The Slow Cider Manifesto – written by Ian McFaul and Darlene Hayes, a far more thorough plan for what I have outlined in this article

The laughable response given by Dame Angela Eagle on raising the juice content from 35 to 50%

BBC news article about Heineken ripping up 300 acres of apple orchard – a headline that seemed to go relatively unnoticed compared to the felling of a single Sycamore that just so happened to be growing on Hadrian’s wall

Me, My Pigs and I.

Farmwashing in British Supermarkets

Everywhere you look, supermarkets are shouting about “Back British Farming.” Union Jacks on the packaging, “local” farm branding in the aisles, and glossy adverts promising support for UK farmers. But are these claims genuine, or just clever marketing…

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a year ago · 11 likes · 10 comments · Helen Freeman

This story is emblematic of my slightly weird obsession with Piemonte.

Since we live in a world of tourism and over-tourism, the desire is to go beyond the places frequented by the tourists is, for better or worse, quite common. I like to think that this story is what comes of going too far off the well trodden path. It is the story of a witch that lived in Pocapaglia, at the southernmost tip of the Roero.

Ever since I came to know about this figure, the witch, I had thought the story was a rather quaint tale from the Italian countryside - a sort of Italian equivalent of Mary Toft, The Godalming Cat Woman if your familiar. It was only when I began writing it up for publishing on substack did I realise that it fit slightly too easily into a general pattern of treatment of witches in the early modern period. As such, I should probably put here that if you don’t like reading accounts of the treatment of witches at this time, don’t read this article.

This story is primarily a translation, with only minor editorial tweaks, of Euclide Milano’s “Leggende della Provincia di Cuneo” (legends of the province of Cuneo), not that he is a particularly notable author/anthropologist nor is his book a particularly stunning work.

This is the story about a witch called Micilina. Whilst Strega is the Italian word for witch, in Piemontese the word is Masca hence Masca Micilina.

Last thing to add before the story starts: I hope the people who do business in the Roero don’t think of me publicising this story as bad publicity. This story, as dark as its ending is, should be cherished as a mysterious tale that can only come from such a mysterious land as the Roero. I hope you enjoy

The story of the Masca Micilina

Micilina was originally from the town of Barolo (from the editorial slant taken for this article, take that as foreboding), she had moved to Pocapaglia after marrying a man from there.

From the get go, this lady was not at all taken to favourably. She is described as being small and misshapen, and her face as “all wrinkles and lumps”. Negativity seemed to surround her like a fog. This wasn’t helped when one day she touched the shoulder of one of the daughters of the group of women that had gathered outside her house having a chat. The next day, this girl developed a hunchback…

And that wasn’t the last of it.

After that, with the villagers starting to form their suspicions, a boy saw her in the street and immediately started running away out of fright. He tripped and fell, and when he got back up, one foot pointed forwards whilst the other stayed pointing backwards!

A little girl, clearly unaware of the other occurrences that had been associated with Micilina, saw her with a basket of fruit one day. The little girl asked if she could have some fruit, Micilina obliged but as soon as she gave it to the girl she became all crooked. Not even attending the weekly mass could straighten her out…

After that ensued a series of bad harvests. With “evidence” already mounting against her, the finger was pointed at Micilina. This began to set Micilina as an outcast of the town - not easy in such a small place like Pocapaglia

One day, Micilina was walking back through the forests from the neighbouring town. She was terrified. She had used the cherries that she brought to market with the intention of selling as a wager in a bet she made there. Having lost the gamble, she was forced to return home, neither cherries nor money in hand - a disappointment she knew would push her husband over the edge.

As she walked through the forest, she came across a man, broad shouldered and elegantly dressed. He asked her why she was distressed and she explained the situation. The gentleman reassured her. He said that he would immediately make her husband calm and harmless; he drew a circle on the ground, inviting Micilina to place a foot within it, then traced strange figures in the air and muttered incomprehensible words. “Your husband,” he said at last, “is at this very moment in a mulberry tree where he is gathering leaves for the silkworms”

“go to him without fear, for he will not harm a hair on your head” he said.

Micilina went to look for him at the spot he had indicated. She saw her husband standing on the tree, silent and motionless.

She shook the tree, and he fell to the ground with clenched teeth and eyes wide open.

Duro e secco, come un baccalà - hard and dry, like a piece of salt cod.

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Now, who was that man who, from the woods amongst the crags a mile away, had made him bite the dust like that? Good question!

Who else could it have been but the devil!?

Several people had seen him that morning whilst they were out in the woods gathering wood: stocky, short-necked, with a large head of shaggy black hair and a goatee like a billy-goat’s. With a friend and protector of that sort, it was all too clear how Micilina could get up to all sorts of mischief!

Shortly afterwards, she did indeed do something else that is worth recounting. One morning, the baker, standing at the door of his bakery—the only one in the village—called out to her, as he had the habit of doing with all the housewives, to tell her to knead the dough. Micilina did not answer the first two calls; but at the third, she suddenly appeared in front of the bakery with the loaves already prepared.

To the baker, who was dumbfounded, the terrible woman explained, without making any secret of it, that when he had called her the first time, she was on the bridge at Pavia, killing a cart driver; at the second call, having set off immediately to return home, she was already near Pocapaglia, under the walnut tree in the shepherd’s meadow; by the third, she had kneaded the dough and baked the loaves…

Then the woman began quarrelling with the baker that he had not relayed all the costs he owed her for breaking the bread. Once he had eventually set everything straight, she cast a spell on him causing him to hit the ground dead.

By now, no one felt safe anymore.

Everyone trembled at the thought of falling under the witch’s spell.

When they saw her appear, they fled in all directions, terrified. The women screamed, the children ran to hide as if the Ogre were coming to eat them; everyone else hastily made the sign of the cross.

One other mother of the village had left her baby in its cradle while she went to wash clothes on the balcony. She saw Micilina emerge from her own front door, having slipped in to see the baby unnoticed. When the mother went to check on her child, she found it completely deformed, twisted and shrivelled.

After this, there was such as uproar from the people of the town that the civil and religious authorities had to intervene. By their decree, the witch was finally prevented from causing further harm

They bound her tightly and locked her in prison; then they put her on trial from which it became evident, by the accused’s own confession, that she had maintained very close ties with the powers of hell.

She confessed to having killed her husband and the baker, and several others, with her magical arts; she confessed above all to having bewitched countless children. After that, the judges had little to do since she was a confessed criminal, and since an example had to be set to rid the country of such a danger, they condemned the witch to be burned at the stake, for only fire could destroy the influences emanating from her and purify the environment.

And so Micilina was burned alive.

The execution took place on a hill north of Pocapaglia, situated between two enormous chasms, one known as the Rocca della Porcheria and the other as the Rocca della Bignina: the road leading there runs for a good stretch along the edge of the cliffs. But when the procession of the monks and the countless crowd flocking to the spectacle reached those parts, a strange mewing was heard through the air, whilst tangled balls of thread fell onto the road, and voices, now hollow, now shrill, cried out: ‘Hold on, Micilina! Hold on!

Micilina was in the midst of the long procession, between the monks and the tormentors who were jostling her forward. She saw the balls of thread, heard the voices calling her; and if she could have seized one of those threads she would have been saved, for they were cast by her invisible witch companions: but the priest accompanying her was sprinkling holy water around her with one hand and holding up the Crucifix with the other.

When the procession finally reached the pyre already prepared for the occasion, Micilina, pale with fear and more hideous than ever, was tied to the stake that stood above it.

The pyre was set alight. First a thick column of smoke was seen, then the flames cracklingly enveloped the hag’s flesh, whose figure appeared at intervals amidst their flickering and writhing and disintegrating into pieces, until all that remained was a vast hearth, whose ashes were scattered to the wind.

Justice had been done.

The crowd that had witnessed the execution dispersed, satisfied, hoping that the village would now be purified.

However, people begun to see flocks of hens scattered about with myriads of chicks, which, instead of their usual chirping, emitted a screech like that of a blacksmith’s file, and vanished as soon as one looked at them closely. A colossal spider with very short legs was seen, walking like an open umbrella skimming the ground, and as soon as it was spotted, it grunted like a pig, fleeing to hide among the rocks; flocks of rams with enormous horns and bristling hair on their backs were seen, hissing like snakes...

What were all those monsters? Nothing other than Micilina’s witch companions; who were either searching for her or seeking to avenge her. And who knows if there aren’t still some there today, hidden amongst the bushes or in the depths of the abyss, near that steep hillock that still bears the name ‘bric d’la masca Micilina’!

It can be distinguished immediately from the others because it is streaked and mottled with reddish patches, caused by the fire in which she was burned and by her own blood.

Perhaps she too returns from time to time.

When night falls upon those cliffs, and the sky is dark with clouds or streaked with lightning, Micilina and her companions perhaps still gather there on some clearing amidst the woods and perform their wild dance, leaping, running, gesticulating, letting out deafening whistles and screams, flying upon broomsticks, hair standing on end, eyes fierce, sharp teeth in their hideous mouths, long forked tongues, scaly skin, and clawed hands and feet. Keep well away!

Barolo is the supposed “Wine of Kings. King of wines.”

I imagine kings these days must have the occasional yearning not to be King. Even if their brother isn’t an alleged paedophile They must want to be able to drop the fancy dress and all the pomp circumstance and just live their life like any other Joe.

What would that look like? Well, fortunately or unfortunately for the “King” side of things we will probably never know. For the “Wine” side, however, there exists a Barolo without the monarchy.

It’s called the Roero.

Stories and tales are interesting way to approach a sense of place (terroir). Perhaps aren’t perceivable in the glass but they still function as an evocation of a place in writing. That’s why today’s article focuses in part on the wines and in part on an interesting tale.

To bring everyone up to speed, in order for a wine to be considered Barolo, beyond having been grown and vinified in the Barolo area, it must be:

• made from 100% Nebbiolo

• aged for at least 38 months

  • of which at least 18 have been in oak barrels

Just over 1 million cases are made to that recipe every year1.

It can be quite austere stuff. Whilst some of it is budget friendly, lots of it isn’t. A lot of it will also never really see the light of day, condemned to bonded warehouses to be traded, without paying VAT, from the collection of one person to the collection of another.

Sounds great if you're into that sort of thing.

It doesn’t sound so great if you are actually interested in drinking wine (what it’s made for?) instead of paying well over a hundred pounds a bottle nor wait 10 years to drink it.

The protocol for Roero reds instead looks like this:

• 95% Nebbiolo (100% for Riserva wines)

• Aged for a minimum of 20 months

  • of which at least 6 have to be in oak

(side note: Due to the regulations, despite often being 100% Nebbiolo, red wines from the Roero DOCG cannot declare Nebbiolo on the label)

To break this down in layman’s terms, the difference in ageing protocols is reflective of the difference in tannic structure of the wines. As I will explain below, the soils of Barolo give increased tannins such that it is deemed necessary for the wines to undergo ageing in wood, to soften tannins, three times the length of the wood ageing for Roero.

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A hermit in the cliffside

If I was writing serious wine guide, this would probably be the part where we go into a deep dive into soil types. Alas, this is an unserious wine guide, so a short overview of soil followed by a story about an unpopular, fez wearing, hermit will have to do.

Barolo’s soils are described as “calcareous marls” ie chalky, sandy clay. Long story short, when Nebbiolo is grown on marl/clayey soils, they produce powerful, tannic wines built for long ageing. Think dense clay and structured wines - viticulturists might take umbrage with that simplification but in this scenario is holds just enough water/wine.

Roero soils, on the other hand, are sandy. Like really, really sandy. Being lower in elevation than the Langhe hills, they came out of the prehistoric ocean much later than the Langhe - essentially they were a beach until much more recently than the Langhe hills were.

This makes for much lighter wines.

If Barbaresco is generally lighter than Barolo, then Roero is lighter still. Easy going tannins, easily drunk 2 years after vintage and drinks nicely with a short visit to the fridge before serving. What’s great about these wines deriving their lightness from the soils as opposed to winemaking choices as that they still carry a lot of complexity whilst also being lighter going - as opposed to some Langhe Nebbiolo which for some more economically minded producers is prioritised as a way to get Nebbiolo on the market faster, rather than create more entry level/approachable wines of quality.

A story of the sands

Born 17th July 1908 in Bra, Grasso rejected a civilian life and instead went to the hills of neighbouring Pocapaglia and dug himself a grotto. “Tall and sturdy like a chestnut tree” is how he was described by writer Giovanni Arpino. He is said to have only left twice, once to fight for the Kingdom of Italy in what was then Abyssinia, and the other to take a wife - the daughter of a . Following his time in Abyssinia, he would walk around the forest in a red fez. Local farmers would bring him eggs and, along with women as from as far as Turin, ask him for recommendations about herbal poultices and remedies. His accompanying recommendation for such remedies? Praying to the holy father and Mussolini.

Keep in mind this is the same Piemonte that I spoke about in the previous article about Italian cider, the one that was one of the centres of the anti-fascist partisan resistance against Mussolini. Consequently, the partisans didn’t take favour with him.

It has been suggested that the local farmers didn’t seem to mind his presence. Indeed, Italians of an older generation, still to this day, always seem delighted to have a chat with whomever they come across. So a fez wearing wanderer of the hills would have likely been a welcome figure to have a chat with for some of these older gentlemen.

Some, however, suspected he was selling information about partisan locations in the hills to the fascists. Others claimed it was his wife who was the more associated of the two as she was singing for the Blackshirts.

“Fare thee well, your hermit has been sorted out for good” wrote Arpino. On 15th of August 1945, the day of the Italian midsummer celebrations. Both him and his wife were shot in the forest and buried face down.

An ecological nightmare patchwork

Barolo and much of the Langhe hills are an ecological nightmare.

It’s an unpopular opinion, though I should make it clear that I don’t think this is the fault of any individual or group of individuals but instead a natural consequence of a wine with incredibly high demand.

Referencing the cru maps for Barolo and Roero, the maps showing the names of each vineyard and hill that winemakers are able to add to their labels if all their grapes come from that spot, there is a clear difference. Almost all of Barolo is under vine.

From one side, this means that there are no natural barriers to disease transfer. The overwhelming majority of these vines being the same variety (albeit with some difference in biotype), this brings a number of problems to the area. Problems that are only going to make themselves more known as time goes on and the climate keeps changing.

On the other side, it does make for an interesting understanding of the territory. Much like a person with no clothes on, nothing is left to the imagination. In winemaking terms, this means that there is rarely a case of “ah I wonder what the wine would be like if they planted on that hill over there” because more often than not, there are already vines in that area.

Here are the maps to prove those points, with each different colour referring only to a different name, not a different grape variety

First Barolo:

And then, the one for the Roero:

If your annoyed because i’ve put these maps too small for any meaningful details, that’s the point - I’m not so concerned about the overall size of each cru but more about how much wild space there is from cru to cru. Some may say that I have only used a cru map and not a total vineyard map. This is true, but a quick trip to google maps, though it won’t display the information as obviously, shows that the forest cover in the Roero is much, much higher than that of the Langhe.

I think this is best summed up by a poem I found whilst doing some light level research on Italian wikipedia, by Mauro Alfonso:

Between these hills,
even the silence
is green.

There is no such poem for the Langhe. As such, I have decided to pen a haiku focusing on one of the main differences between the Langhe and Roero, for journalistic balance

The vines cover all.
Spraying abounds the landscape.
What about my health?

It’s no big news that densely planted wine regions have above average pesticide use. It would also be unfair of me not to mention examples like the Cannubi Bio project, spearheaded, by Chiara Boschis, that has managed to convert nearly all of the producers farming the Cannubi hill to do so organically. It’s also definitely true that there are some vineyards are the Roero that are managed with all number of sprays.

However, where the vines aren’t growing, it isn’t just the trees and shrubs that are left to grow. It is the imagination as well. In the completely unfarmed parts, often a short walk away from the vineyards, steep cliffs give way to deep valleys. Walking in these parts can feel like entering a different time.

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Phone signal is patchy but the ringing of bells in the local towns reminds you that you aren’t far from civilisation. This ringing also brings you to a previous age of maps and horse-drawn transport, where the bells of the small towns of the Roero guided those who were travelling from town to town.

I’m sure Barolo and Langhe were once like this as well, but they have big castles announcing their presence in the landscape. The towns of the Roero hills, by contrast, seem like they have been balanced on hilltops or wedged into cliffs - kept in place only by the locals, passionate enough to ensure their longevity in this strange landscape. By chance, I have met a few of these people, and they are quite strange in themselves.

One example would be the lady I met in the forest with a mop bucket and knife who had been out collecting Hen-of-the-Woods fungus, presumably to eat. When pressed on how she found them, she looked at us and told us that the tree had given them to her and her only - she had passed by a few days before and, knowing that they were explicitly for her, she took her time to return and eventually make a harvest.

I don’t think she would exist in the Langhe. Obviously I don’t have any evidence, but there is scarce little woodland where she could convene with the trees in the manner in which she does, let alone access them without being seen by every single surrounding property.

My coverage of the Roero won’t stop here. On Friday I will release the story of a witch who lived in the Roero - it isn’t relevant to an understanding of the wines but is still evocative of the wilderness of the Roero. I will also be chatting with producers, divulging more of the history of the place, giving some coverage to the white wines of the Roero and finding good bottles to recommend.

I hope these stories have, at least partially, piqued your interest in the Roero. If not oenologically then perhaps historically or folklorically.

1. Cider was made in Italy, predominantly in the Alpine Valleys to the north

2. Mussolini’s government made cider production illegal

3. Its now seeing a slow but steady resurgence and has great promise as an industry

And that functions as a great “tl;dr” but if, like me, you care about the “why?” for all/any of that, I suggest you carry on reading…

1927 was a great year for Italian wine. I haven’t read any vintage reports about 1927 but I do know one thing: that year Mussolini outlawed the production of all alcoholic beverages that weren’t wine. Much like using herbicide to remove other plants from a vineyard to limit competition with the vines, he had stamped out everything else that might ever outcompete the rise of Italian wine.

“Were Italians producing anything else except wine anyway?”

Good question.

The answer is an interesting one but requires the explanation of a few other facts - namely what is meant by “Italians” and what is meant by “wine”. These are two things that might appear as clearly defined now, but for a long time were imbued with a strong element of fluidity.

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Italians and italians

66 years before 1927 was 1861, the year of Italian Unification. People often talk about “how young Italy is” as a country but I don’t think they really understand what that really means (I probably don’t understand it fully either).

The various states of the Italian peninsula were brought under the banner of one nation, of course. However, on a human level there were a bunches of people had to contend with calling other groups of people compatriots when they never had had any connection these people before. Barely any of them spoke the same language, they didn’t eat the same food, believe in the same religion1 or even measure their fields in the same way. In short, they were communities each with a fundamentally different understanding of the world around them. Creating a cohesive national identity out of a group of people as diverse as this is probably like trying to arrange jigsaw when none of the pieces fit together - you need to cut your own notches to fit them together.

For cider culture to be outlawed as “foreign” in Italy, a sense of “indigenous” must be created that things can be rejected against.

I present a small guide:

Useful things to create a homogenous national identity:

Mind your language

If you spend an extended period in Italy, usually outside of a metropolitan centre or tourist hotspot, and develop a good understanding of the language, you will likely encounter one of the Italian “dialects.” sums up this inevitable encounter perfectly:

You freeze. You smile. You pray for subtitles.

But these prayers go unheard. What is that language? You think to yourself. You know that you’ve been learning Italian for years but you’ve never come across phrases like “è parej” or “Fa’ ballà l’oeucc” before.

In that post by Italy Untold (below), it’s laid out very clearly how this change from linguistic diversity to homogeneity came about.

Italy Untold

Rule #7: To Become Italian, you must Realize that “Italian” isn’t the language Italians were born with

There’s a moment every foreigner eventually faces in Italy. You arrive, you’ve practiced your “buongiorno” with the confidence of someone who believes the job is done, and then a man in a bar opens his mouth and says something that sounds almost Italian but also like a private language invented on the spot. You freeze. You smile. You pray for subtitles…

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10 months ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Italy Untold

To add one interesting aspect not mentioned in that article. Linguistically, these “dialects” are not “dialects” at all but languages. The word “dialect” implies the existence of a mother language from which other languages derive - which Italian as it is spoken today and its “dialects” are not2. Instead, “Italian” as it’s spoken today is based on Florentine and the northern and southern “dialect” groups both have distinct mother languages, and therefore are mutually unintelligible from each other.

I presume, though haven’t thoroughly researched this hypothesis, that these regional tongues were relegated from language to dialect in part as to undermine each region in its distinct identity and therefore make the idea of a cohesive, national, whole more appealing.

Food

Sharing food, like sharing language, is a great way of making people feel connected.

On the flip side, not sharing food is a great way of making people feel disconnected.

Creating a national cuisine beyond just a regional cuisine functions to do both of these things at the same time: make all nationals connected whilst identifying all those who aren’t nationals as such by the fact they don’t eat the same food. It is, therefore, a hugely important tool in the creation of a homogenous nation.

For Italy, the first stone laid in the creation of what would later become Italian Cuisine as it is today came 30 years after unification in the form of Pellegrino Artusi’s La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene or “Science in the kitchen and the art of eating well,” to you and me.

Armed with both language and cuisine, alongside the radio and television, Mussolini came to power in 1922. If there were any doubts/threats/questions about the fragility of the Italian identity, they certainly wouldn’t last long.

At this point, I should probably clarify that I don’t think Mussolini is/was solely responsible for making Italy and Italianness what it is today. The cultural homogenisation that occurred post unification was in keeping with general trends across Europe and indeed to be expected for any nation that has recently unified. However, it is clear that there are certain cultural practices, such as the making of cider (on which this article is focused) that were discarded from the cannon of commonly recognised Italian practices that may have remained had there not been a government that so readily marginalised the practices of Italians who were seen as “at odds” with the mainstream concept of “Italy” at the time.

So, with a language, people and culture all beginning to take homogenous shape, any other features of the cultural landscape that are at odds with mainstream “Italianness” were seen as “foreign” and therefore needed to be removed. I’m sure there are plenty of instances of this. For one, the word “sandwich” was considered too American by the Mussolini government and was replaced with “tramezzino,” a word invented by Gabriele D’Annunzio, poet and man credited with Partially inventing Italian fascism. This article is however, focused on cider, not sandwiches.

To the mountains we go

The lower, more expansive, and rolling hills of Italy are associated with grapes. It is only once you start getting to higher territories that apples and pears start to appear in a meaningful way. In these higher valleys, the grapevine often struggles to perform in the freezing winters and hot, short, summers and therefore requires only perfectly exposed plots and most fervent worshipers of the grapevine in order to survive - something that is not present in every valley.

The valleys of Piemonte are, like all valleys of the Italian Alps, liminal spaces. Neither “here” nor “there”. Spaces where identity is not conferred through borders and limitations but through relationships and interactions. Consequently, their practices, rituals and identity are in conflict with an Italian identity that is clearly defined, unchanging and permanent - as Mussolini would have preferred it. Whilst the fascist regime used imagery of man’s domination over nature, the priorities of these communities were often maligned3.

Since Neolithic times in these spaces it was common for livestock that had been kept in stables or lowland pasture during the winter to be walked up along roads and through villages to reach their mountain pastures for the summer once they had cleared of snow. Grazing both on the way up in the spring and down once they had exhausted all that the pasture that the mountains had to offer and temperatures were starting to drop. For a beautifully represented and well written story focusing how the transhumance manifests itself in all forms dairy, I cannot suggest ’s substack highly enough - it is an incredibly beautiful and well written body of work.

Part of this seasonal travel incorporated silvo-pastoralism – the practice of controlled livestock grazing of pastures under tree cover. In mountain communities, this practice allowed for the cultivation of important “perennial woody crops” (trees) on land that could also help to sustain livestock - thus allowing the land to benefit the community twice over. In a post “green-revolution” era this is often relegated to the leagues of fanciful farming practices with no real profitable application. In mountain communities it was a way of cultivating trees for nuts (and therefore bread), baskets (and therefore increase harvest capacities), clogs (ditto), oil and fire wood whilst also using the land as grazing for livestock.

“But what does this have to do with cider?”

Well, I had always thought of alpine silvopastoralism as being used almost exclusively in conjunction with chestnut trees. Known as "L’albero del pane” or tree of bread in English, it is both a large tree resistant to the force of a cow scratching its arse on its trunk and a giver of a multiplicity of incredibly useful products (as mentioned before). Indeed, many of the alpine technologies that are still visible in the valleys to this day are build around the cultivation chestnuts.

You might now expect an obvious segue to the tune of “but they also grazed under apple orchards!” Hold your horses. We haven’t got there yet.

I contacted an apple farmer friend (also called Ivo) who farms just outside of the tiny tiny town of Valgrana. Over several WhatsApp audio messages recorded as we walked around his fields, he explained to me that the cultivation of walnuts was also very prevalent in the valleys. These nuts would be harvested and then taken to community mills in town centres where they would be crushed and pressed for oil. The crushing and pressing of nuts for oil requires the same tools as the crushing and pressing of apples for juice, albeit with some small modifications. Growing seasons being as short as they are in Alpine valleys, the accompanying approach to surplus is one that is also seeing huge revival amongst modern restaurants: “Zero Waste.” Another producer I spoke to, further north in Val di Susa, wrote to me about huge piles of apples being left in the town square in the valley for any and all to come along and to take apples for cider, vinegar and juice.

This zero waste mentality also applied to any wine production in these areas. Whilst modern winemakers benefit from hydraulic presses being able to press every last drop out of grapes when making wine, they are in a tiny minority if we consider winemakers throughout history. Instead of letting grape skins that still contain some flavour and/or sugar and therefore can be fermented go to waste, they were added to apple juice and fermented together as a grape-apple hybrid.

Fascist dictators, generally speaking, are opposed to the idea of hybridisation or mixing. They often prefer purity. I’m sure I don’t need to provide examples for this. In the case of mountain communities and their ferments, however, the case is particularly interesting. If cider was seen as something “foreign” and therefore to be outlawed, wine was seen as the chosen drink of Italian culture and history.

A mix of cider and wine?

Heresy.

The water mill of Valgrana doesn’t run anymore. There are some carp in its millrace and the town, with its 800 inhabitants and 4 churches, sits quietly nestled in the valley behind Caraglio, a town “famous” only for its Bagna Cauda festival4. Passing through it today, it seems like a sleepy Italian town - a true paesello. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, there was over 2,500 people living there. Ivo told me that the varieties of apples grown in the valley were in their thousands. Its likely some were landrace varieties specifically matched to the environment of the specific valley where they grew. He explained to me that people in the valley would have their apples pressed and milled and then they would make their own cider at home for home consumption - not something to be commercialised.

The decline

The winter of 1927 rolled around. Livestock moved off their mountain pastures for the winter. Apples and nuts harvested, processed and stored. Cheeses ageing. The change for this season - cider had been made illegal.

Production didn’t stop immediately - people likely weren’t going to be prosecuted for making cider in the valleys since it was largely a familial affair. However the ban definitely put the breaks on any growth for Italian autochthonous apple production and culture. This can still be seen today. The top apple cultivars grown in Italy today are the likes of Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Gala and Granny Smith. I hope it comes as no surprise that Maria Ann “Granny” Smith, of the eponymous apple variety, was Australian, not Italian.

It’s possible that apple production would have weathered this change in the law if it weren’t for another very big problem - the Second World War. This was a particular pressing issue for the inhabitants of the Piemontese Valleys as they made up one of heartlands of the Italian Anti-fascist resistance movement. In a situation of death or liberty, apple cultivation, understandably, doesn’t get a look in. The war, together with an increasingly industrialised society saw valley populations plummet and in their absence so too was the cultivation of Italian apples almost lost.

When Mussolini eventually fell and the new Republic of Italy was brought in, cider was hardly on the tips of everyone’s tongue. Whilst it probably wasn’t outright illegal in the way it had been before the war, nobody was making it and so there wasn’t any market for it either. With nobody making it, there doubtless would have been many a tax document that would have been required for the duty to be paid.

This would be more effort than it was worth especially considering that a hugely profitable, international, Italian wine boom was about to start taking off not long after the war. This boom would end up being so successful that people would start cutting corners and adding methanol to their wines which in turn made people go blind - though this is a story for another time.

It was only in 2015 that the legal position of cider with regard to duty taxes was clarified. The modern Italian ‘ciderscape’ is a drop in the ocean compared to the wine industry. The producers of modern Italian cider are, however, incredibly interesting people especially in their production philosophies and lack of recent historical context compared to wine. Their work, and fast arriving fame, I will cover in a future article(s).

L’Ombra di un bel fior

To conclude this article, I would like to focus on the song Bella Ciao. Though this is often quoted as the anthem of the Italian resistance, it seems as though there is little evidence to suggest it was actually sung by the partigiani during WWII. Similarly, there is no evidence to suggest that cider was “the drink of the partisans” and helped fuel an anti-fascist revolution, so I am not going to write that here either. I will, however, take artistic licence with the lyrics of the song. If you don’t know these lyrics, I suggest looking them up, they are incredibly emotive.

Through the song, the central figure sings:

O Partisan, take me away.
Take me away as I feel as though I may die.
And if I die, I die as a partisan
And you must bury me up there in the mountain
Under the shade of a beautiful flower.
And the people that pass by will say "what a beautiful flower."
This is the flower of the partisan
Who died for liberty

The “flower of the partisan” (il fiore del partigiano) is cited as being the wild red poppy. However, when I go to the mountains with my friends, I can’t help but noticing some of the ancient apple trees that are dotted around the valley, especially when they are in blossom. These trees stand as testament to a different age. The people who own them refuse to let them go, krummholz and covered in moss, planks of wood are often needed to make sure they don’t fell themselves under the weight of fruit and then snow. Yet they remain standing and remain fruiting. Though they may groan under the weight of fruit, they remained unbending in the fight for freedom.

If you are lucky enough to come across an Italian cider, you are not just drinking a country’s first steps in rediscovering its apple culture, you are also drinking a bottle of fermented freedom.

“I thought you were going to write about unknown regions. Why are we starting within walking distance of one of the most sought after vineyards of Barolo?”

That’s a fair point.

When you arrive in Verduno there isn’t loads to do. If I had to guess, the top reasons people who aren’t Verdunese go there are (in order):

1. the hospital

2. a wine tasting/restaurant booking

3. They either took the bus from Pollenzo back to Bra the wrong way or never got off at Pollenzo and ended up in the Verduno hospital car park (accounting for around 70% of my visits)

To give it a bit more love, most guides for the Langhe tell you to go to Piazza Castello in La Morra for the best view of rolling hills of the Langhe. The view from La Morra is great but everyone has been told to go there. Verduno has almost the exact same view, nobody has read to go there in a guide and there’s a green space with benches (above) from which you can enjoy it all.

Back to the wine. There are two grape varieties by the name of Pelaverga, Pelaverga grosso and piccolo. The focus of today is Pelaverga Piccolo. A variety with only c.24ha planted in Verduno, making up just 12% of the vineyards of there (the highest concentration of the variety in the whole country). A fair few well-known wine guides get away with a very clever literary trick when they write about this variety. They will write something along the lines of “Pelaverga Piccolo is said to have been brought to Verduno, from Turin, by Sebastiano Valfrè. In that area they grow lots of Pelaverga Grosso which turns out to be a completely different variety but before genetic testing they weren’t to know that.”

Ok, you’ve told me what it isn’t but I want to know what it is. Across all the obvious resources I could consult, the prognosis didn’t look so good:

“It is frankly difficult to get enthusiastic about; even one of its major producers admits that he personally doesn’t like it.”

–Nicolas Belfrage MW’s Brunello to Valpolicella: The Wines of Northern Italy

“Pelaverga, pale, rare, red grape of Piemonte making slightly fizzy, strawberry-flavoured wines. The even rarer and more admired Pelaverga Piccolo is a distinct variety.”

–The Oxford Companion to wine (Same literary trick here as I mentioned)

“Verduno Pelaverga makes an excellent wine, and credit goes to the local producers who believed enough in the variety to attempt monovarietal bottlings rather than blends with Barbera or Nebbiolo, as was customary”

-Ian D’Agata’s Native Wine Grapes of Italy

Thanks Ian. Luckily, I already have a bit of experience with the grape. So instead of being “put off” by what everyone is writing, I was just shocked at how unjust I thought they’d been to a wine that holds amazing potential

However, if you go onto the websites of some of the producers who make varietal wines from Pelaverga, a very different picture is painted:

“If it’s true that smells redeliver the past, this wine is a little Time Machine. It takes you back, far away, to an exotic setting of mysterious, hazy, lights and shadows”

-G.B Burlotto

“Let yourselves be seduced! Suggestion: drink in company…”

-Fratelli Alessandria

“Only the beauty of the wild poppy [on the label] manages to convey [its] harmony. This rare fruit is an oenological pearl…”

“Like a kiss, the wild poppy, which popular tradition considers an aphrodisiac, awakens desires.”

-Castello di Verduno

Hang on, I was told a few moments this wine was going to be somewhere between “difficult to get enthusiastic about” and “excellent,” what’s with all this chat about seduction, pearls, poppies and time machines??

Even the producers I’ve just quoted seem a reticent about their wines at time. Of the ones that offer bookable tastings on their website, none list their Pelaverga as one of the wines of the flight you will taste. This isn’t because it’s cost prohibitive. Pelaverga rarely, if ever, costs more than £30, easily at the very lower limit of prices of Barolo - so what’s going on? Or, more importantly:

What the F*ck is Pelaverga?

At a glance, Pelaverga glows a crystalline pinky red in the glass. If you have ever been lucky enough to buy early season, forced rhubarb then it is a similar sensation. Glowing pink, radiating through your kitchen, probably doing unmeasurable amounts of good to your mental health purely from you just looking at it. This colour feels religious. Indeed, the previously mentioned Sebastiano Valfrè who is said to have brought the grape to the town, was also responsible for spiritual education of Duke Vittorio Amadeo II of Savoy - the longest serving Savoyard Monarch. Though whether or not that’s actually relevant to the wine you can decide for yourself.

“On the palate,” or if you prefer “when you drink it”, it’s light and slightly peppery. There’s a bit of the strawberriness that is mentioned in the Oxford companion, but not in a sickly sweet, “fruit bomb” kind of way. The strawberries here present themself like wild strawberries: to be enjoyed while they last and making you crave another one straight away.

The Langhe is filled to the coffers with Nebbiolo anyway. Be it as Barolo, Barbaresco, Nebbiolo d’Alba, Langhe Nebbiolo, the places is coming apart at the seams with the stuff.

If you are a so called Nebb-head, this probably sounds great. If you are an anything else-head, not so fun.

Part of the reason that the Langhe is this way is because its had a few centuries worth of investment from various royal families and high courts to be point that it is the best place in the world for growing Nebbiolo. Alongside pioneering quality wines, the royal families, most notably the house of Savoy, were also pioneering the perfect cuisine to go with subalpine climate and powerful wines: pasta made with 40 egg yolks per kilo of flour, roast veal with a tuna mayonnaise (aka a dish where every ingredient is a different protein aka Vitello tonnato) and anchovies and garlic stewed in milk blitzed up then warmed by candlelight (bagna cauda). I would struggle to justify eating any of these dishes on a regular basis. As delicious as they are, they must also be filed under “gastronomic curiosities that are both incredibly emblematic of a place but also almost never found in home kitchens - much like fish and chips in the UK.” Their richness, their indulgence and their extravagance make for delightful restaurant experiences, but I also think that the wines that are quite literally made for these foods should be as excluded from casual weeknight dining as the dishes are.

As a result, even fresher expressions of Nebbiolo, like Langhe Nebbiolo, might not be the best choice especially if you are a “have a glass or two with a meal then pop it back in the fridge” drinker or, by chance, you don’t employ a Savoyard cook to prepare all your meals

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It sounds like I’m trying to rearrange the night sky by saying that Nebbiolo isn’t actually the North Star and that we are all sailing our ships toward wine nirvana in the wrong direction. Really, I just want to suggest that maybe, possibly, there is an argument to be had that our respective North Stars should be those which allow us to most greatly and freely have a great time.

A well-made and nicely aged Nebbiolo is lovely, but how lovely will it ever be if you can’t take it to a friend’s house because you know they will be drinking it out of jam jars and even if you brought nice glasses with you, you would still feel the need to do it justice by explaining a bit about the wine which always (NB: Always) makes so you seem at least a bit like a knob? Pelaverga speaks for itself in the glasses, jam jars, teacups, bowls, pencil pots of all drinkers irrespective of their knowledge of wine. Straight away it looks beautiful - a vibrant red of crystalline clarity that almost glows in the glass (granted you won’t be able to see this if you drink it from a teacup).

However, on matters of taste, there is no reason why my perspective should be blindly followed over anyone else’s. After all, that’s one of the reasons I started writing on substack to begin with - to add a drop to the ocean of wine journalism so that perhaps the tide might change to a more democratised one where people feel they can speak their mind.

So instead of hearing it from me, I reached out to a couple of the winemakers of this grape. Given the small number of the producers of Pelaverga di Verduno, just talking to two producers is equivalent to around 10% of all producers.

Walter Salvano

I first found Walter’s wines on Instagram. “A new, interesting producer in Langhe” I thought. He’s probably got some Nebbiolo plot off some relative and has started making that and now added a Pelaverga, I thought.

So I went looking for his other wines and found no Nebbiolo at all. Just a Freisa and a Pelaverga (at that time). My mind then switched to “who is this guy??” I’m no businessman but this guy must have some guts to produce two fairly unheard of varieties as his first wines. His bottles also look endlessly fascinating. No calligraphic fonts, no medals from some exhibition held in the 19th century, no drawings depicting the setting sun over a vineyard. Instead an abstract, explosive, “familiar yet unrecognisable” illustration in neon colours. Then a back label - endlessly utilitarian, beautifully Helvetica.

Whilst other producers might think of Pelaverga as occupying a similar role as “those wines”, the ones that are quick to make and fast to put on the market, Walter’s are “the wines”. As a result, he grabs the bull by the horns. The 2022 vintage saw 12 day whole cluster maceration, quite long compared to other producers, followed by 7 months in stainless steel and 5 months in bottle. The respect paid to the variety shows up in the glass, with the relatively long maceration having given the wine some welcomed seriousness.

Fratelli Alessandria

An historic producer of Verduno. One of the oldest producers of the Barolo DOCG. Looking at their lineup, there is a lot of black calligraphics on white labels and bottles with black capsules - smart stuff. Then, out pops a bottle with a shiny pink capsule and strange abstract painting. “Speziale” it says - the spiced soul of Verduno. It’s the pelaverga that got me into pelaverga, probably the easiest to source, owing to the fact that whilst being a well renowned producer in the Langhe, they don’t have a strict allocation1.

The grapes for this wine are sourced from a variety of parcels across Verduno (helpfully displayed on a map on their website), this likely gives them a bit of control over harvests and ripeness. I didn’t ask what their harvesting regime is for this wine, but can only imagine that the c.150m elevation change between their highest and lowest plots helps them to keep acidity and tannins well measured and approachable. Again, it’s a gorgeous wine. A wine that feels shameful to drink because you can’t still look at it in the glass afterwards - thankfully there’s a bit left in the bottle!

So, why Pelaverga?

One of the first reasons that I thought a young producer like Walter would have started with a wine as obscure as Pelaverga is because he had always drunk it and so, much like some of the offspring of Barolo producers, it was his calling to make this wine. I was surprised to find out that Pelaverga wasn’t a permanent fixture in his wine consumption.

Though he comes from three generations of winemakers in Diano d’Alba, he didn’t have his first pelaverga until he was 18, in what he described as his first “conscious tasting experiments”. His wines are, unsurprisingly, born out of a desire to push drinkers to reconsider the secondariness of wines made from secondary varieties in the Langhe having added a Nascetta and a Barbera to his lineup.

Whilst I would happily refer to the monoculture of Nebbiolo as a nightmare, Walter takes a more diplomatic stance of reiterating that the territory of the Langhe is clearly a perfect match for Nebbiolo despite there being some issues. Though he left the obvious risks of having such a ubiquitous monoculture to one side (that I will discuss in more detail in my upcoming articles about the Roero), his worry of such Nebbiolo dominance of the territory was in lesser varieties being marginalised purely because there is more money to be made with Nebbiolo.

This was something I brought up with the team at Fratelli Alessandria - the marginalisation of other varieties due to a prioritisation of Nebbiolo and Barolo. They described Pelaverga as the unique sequence in their DNA. There are plenty of small towns in the Barolo area, only one of them is the home of this strange grape called Pelaverga - this is part of what defines Verduno and by extension defines them as producers in Verduno.

Since they rank amongst the most well known of the producers making Pelaverga, I also wanted to know if they ever felt a bit stylistically cramped when it came to making the wine. There are thousands of producers in Barolo, it takes a decent sized group to do some decently radical things (ie the Barolo Boys) in order for people to take notice. In Verduno, on the other hand, I wondered if it ever feels a bit surveilled - as if all the other 19 producers (or there abouts) are constantly judging your winemaking. They told me that instead, with so few producers, Pelaverga production was like a “jam session compared to a symphony orchestra” there is an implicit open-ness to experiment, to collaborate and to see what comes of it.

From all of the articles I read and questions I asked to producers, there really seems to a buzz that can’t quite be tied down when it comes to Pelaverga. The standardised language developed for wines seems to go out the window and they start saying all manner of strange things. People light up when you talk about it.

Even the most un-customer-friendly employee of a wine shop will curl a small grin from the side of their mouth when you ask for a bottle/glass provided they carry it, otherwise they’ll probably give you the blankest of blank stares.

Here is a list of other recommended producers with links to their wine searcher pages to find availability in your market. For European (including UK) readers, Fratelli Alessandria can be ordered from xtrawine though always good to check your local shop to see if they stock any.

• Castello di Verduno

• Scarpa

• Diego Morra

• G.B. Burlotto

• Gian Luca Colombo

Lastly, Walter doesn’t have a distributor in the UK at the time of writing, though he is represented by Stelle wine co. in New York. However, if you come to the Langhe, do make sure to try and find a bottle at:

• Petricore (Alba)

• I malpensanti (Alba)

• Cichin (Alba)

• Eremo della gasprina (La Morra)

• Petti bistrot (Barolo)

• Trattoria la piazzetta (Valdivilla)

I’d love to jump head first into the complete unknown of the world of things in bottles: the wild apple forests of the Tian Shen Mountain range, some grape variety thought lost only to be found in the potting shed of an old Georgian woman, or tales from Sardinia’s largest cork manufacturer. These stories will have to wait. In part because I haven’t written them yet but also because I have never been to the Tian Shen Mountains.

For now, let’s begin with finding obscurity in the familiar.

There’s loads of books written about Barolo and Barbaresco. These books are very high quality fuel for anyone looking to gain as much knowledge as possible on the subject. They are also high quality fuel for your choice of LLM to summarise this information and give it to you as a set of bullet points or tailor-generated podcast.

Writing about places that aren’t written in these books on Barolo and Barbaresco, or at very least writing far more about them than what is written in these books serves a dual purpose. It will hopefully open your eyes to see that there is an unknown, yet high quality, world of wine that doesn’t have any experts or dogma hanging over it like a cloud of orthodoxy telling you what you should and shouldn’t think about it. Secondly, it will likely also end up as fuel for any other LLM to deliver than information to someone else…

Both are valid, though my main intent for this series is the former: lifting the lid on places that produce great wines that have neither benchmark bottles that are financially exclusive if you want to gain an understanding from top to bottom, nor do they have an expert telling you what is good and what isn’t. You can make your own mind up. I don’t claim to be an expert on these places or these wines, I’ve just had enough of them to think that other people should know about them too. If you want to go and become the expert on them, then by all means go ahead. For now, let us delight in their freedom, their deliciousness and their somewhereness.

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Having lived there for three years, it was through Piemonte1 that I came to realise what a strange place both Italy generally and the region specifically is. First and foremost, Piemonte is of course the home of “The Wine of Kings and the King of Wines”, a title I tend to smell a fish about though I am yet to find substantial evidence to suggest its bogus. I am talking about Barolo. 14 million bottles released a year. Each one its own specific expression of that producer and that vintage and that plot. Each one pretty expensive. Each one, as i’ve already mentioned, not destined to be written about on this substack.

Writing about wine from under appreciated regions is great. Drinking the wines from them is great too. Is it inherently better? No, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t great.

It feels like the drinking equivalent of going somewhere on holiday that doesn’t have any wifi and only a shred of mobile signal. In order to be able to understand this place you’re going to have to figure it out yourself. In figuring it out yourself, you can make up your own opinions without any baggage - you won’t feel like a contrarian for going against popular opinion or what critics say either because neither of these two have opinions on the matter.

Places with no wifi have restaurants with little to no reviews. That doesn’t mean these restaurants are bad, it just means that there is no written testament to how good they are. Walk into these restaurants and you’ll probably see locals having a great time with their families as they probably have done for ages. It seems like they are having a good time. So, why does nobody know about these places? The wine equivalent to that is finding a great bottle, the sort of bottle that the guy running the shop (who’s glasses never sit straight on his face) offers you with a shrug saying “this is alright”, enjoying it with friends, thinking its so good that you buy another the next day thinking you’ll keep it to bring it back home with you. Upon returning to the holiday home that evening, you realise you don’t have anything to drink apart from that bottle and so your forced to open it, enjoy it just the same, but you’re leaving the next morning so can’t go back to the shop. “That’s fine.” You think to yourself. “I’m sure I'll be able to get it somewhere when I go home.”

Only to find barely a crumb of evidence as to this bottle’s existence online when you get home. Poorly reviewed or not reviewed at all by critics and carried only by one shop but even they have already sold out of it.

Maybe I went slightly too far with the analogy. The point being, however, that potentially at a loss of widespread availability (The wines I will talk about might involve some extra digging but should be findable in most places) you buy yourself the freedom to be able to enjoy a bottle and have that be your rating. It's a polar opposite to thinking a wine is great only to give it a scan with wine searcher or vivino and see its been given 3/5 stars or 85/100 or even worse: that the likes of Tom Gilbey have said it pairs perfectly with a rusty horseshoe on one of their Instagram reels…

In this series I’m researching Piemontese grape varieties that don’t get their due diligence, stories from places that either aren’t written about because they don’t produce wine or are only written about with regard to their wine production, filling in interesting bits that the wine critics miss out.

Piemonte the Peculiar won’t be a cohesive story with a beginning, middle, and an end. All articles written under this banner will instead be found under a section on the main page, that needn’t be read in a specific order unless obviously stated. The first instalment comes out this Wednesday and I hope to see you there!

This another article that can be filed under “justifying (to myself and others) why this substack should exist.” It isn't massively aligned with what I plan to write about in the future but at this point in the fledgling stages of this page it seems necessary to make some opening remarks that need to be gotten out of the way early and can be looked back on in the future. Following from that, there will be two posts this week so that I can get back on the track that I properly want to be in. //preamble over//

During a recent catchup with a friend when this question was posed to me.

I was stumped.

I had clearly spent too long surrounding myself with people whose caring for wine was a prerequisite to the conversation and therefore didn’t need justifying, clarifying or building upon.

It was good to leave the bubble. To challenge my thoughts and make my brain work in a way that it had been avoiding because it hadn’t needed to up until that point. My response to the claim comes in two parts.

If you don’t drink and never have.

You probably shouldn’t care. This isn’t particularly the main focus today so I only have a few, non-exhaustive words

People who have a large stake, personal and/or financial, in the wine industry jump up and down about sinking wine consumption across the world. This makes sense, they have invested lots of their money and a lot of their time and life into alcohol consumption and to see the tide start to change on it is probably concerning. However, there have always been people who don’t drink. There have also always been people who probably wouldn’t drink, but their circumstance (starting uni, living somewhere where a pub offers one of the only social spaces etc.) mean that they are to some degree forced to do so. I agree that drinking alcohol is considered a tradition in lots of different places - I disagree that we should make people drink alcohol purely in the name of tradition. In the more accepting world that we all (hopefully) want to create, I don’t think we should try and get this sort of person to start drinking.

If you do drink, but don’t care about wine.

It’s not quite the same thinking as drinking coffee just to plop one out on the John of a morning, but it’s definitely moving in that direction.

I get it. This is probably the sort of person who drinks, enjoys drinking, probably drinks more beer than wine but wouldn’t reply “water’s fine” when asked “red or white?”. For this person, however, “red or white” is as probably as far they want to get into it. They don’t want all the chat about varieties and hills and vines and France and weeds and la di dah.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this is due to the way wine education is presented - the “how you should care about wine”. The main reason I think this is because of a fantastic article written from the Wine Scholar Guild. As they put it, “wine tasting has become a soulless exercise in conformity” due to wine education no longer serving its purpose of facilitating enjoyment. So of course people aren’t going to care about it. Who would ever say yes to “do you want to meet up on Friday for a bottle of soulless conformity?” or “I’ve just bought a bottle of soulless conformity, do you think it would go well with a Sunday roast?” That beer is looking a lot more tempting…

As Sara Danese put it:

“Humanity doesn’t need wine, but in my view, it stands for everything that is real, and everything that refuses to be justified by a purely utilitarian argument”.

In the mood for wine

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7 months ago · 16 likes · 9 comments · Sara Danese

Everything that is real. Terrifying. More terrifying the more true you believe it to be. As Sara points out in their article, we live in an age of mobile phones that serve our every purpose, of LLMs that read and write everything we want for us. Don’t we want something, anything, that gives us some respite from this suspended existence?. It’s not a particularly real existence. I’m fully willing to admit that reading this substack isn’t particularly real either. No ink has needed to be used or replenished in order to write it - reading it probably hasn’t put a dent in the charge of whatever you’re reading it on either.

“But that argument doesn't necessarily just apply to wine,” you might argue. I would tend to disagree. Walk into any British supermarket, day or night, and you’ll realise you are neither in a time nor a place. All semblance of seasonal or geographical variations have been stripped away and in their place there is courgettes and tomatoes all wrapped in plastic, all months of the year, anywhere you go. Similarly, one of Beer’s great features is that it can be distilled (in a figurative sense) down to a recipe that can be shipped around the world and replicated almost to the T. The shelf stability of cereals is contributor to the human race’s global success and the capability to isolate of selected yeast strains is a demonstration of that success. Neither of these things are bad but it shows that wine can offer an edge in a sense of belonging - a sense of somwhereness.

That is what I want to focus on with this page - all the wine that “refuses to be justified by a purely utilitarian argument”. The wines that talk of somewhere and the histories, tales and people that are found in this somewhere.

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So I’ll hope you join me as I delve into the weird and wonderful. You don’t have to have any knowledge of “the big names” of any region nor do you have to have any knowledge of any region at all. I’ll be writing about all the things in the bottles, not just drinks - the stories, the people, the arguments and the land.

Here we go again.

Someone else who thinks they have something to say.

Someone else who thinks they have something to say about wine.

Some other young person who thinks they have something to say about wine.

Just when I thought everything had already been said, I began to realise that I could actually find very few people who wrote about wine or cider who I could really get behind in terms of what they said and how they said it. We live in an age of weather forecasts and breakfasts that “set in” extreme plurality - more people than ever can hold their own opinion and even if their president/prime minister/supreme leader would rather they didn’t hold these opinions, more often than not they find a way of sharing these opinions thanks to social media. Yet the wine world is still hanging on to a time when a handful of voices stand above the rest and these voices are used to deliver point scores that can shape the future of various wineries. They are essentially direction givers in a land where you will definitely get lost without consulting their advice - an absolutely invaluable task. However, I think the direction-giver and the traveller have agendas far more different to one and other than we originally think. The direction-giver has often travelled on more streets and in more areas than the traveller ever will in their lifetime. So of course the direction-giver will have a different, likely more jaded, view of certain places. Critics, having to taste thousands of wines, have a defined set of criteria by which to judge them. Not only does this make it easier to make sense of a thousand wines, but it also makes it easier to understand what wines to recommend and why. Going back to the direction-giver example, I think this can lead to the direction-giver giving directions based on the quality of roads and the clarity of road signs when the traveller might be looking for a nice view. Obviously neither of these are inherently wrong, but sometimes I quite like travelling for the views and the sake of the journey instead of the quality of the road.

This is what I want to try and create as a space on substack. A platform for interesting anecdotes/stories/facts to be shared about things in bottles so that maybe someone someday will either be inspired to learn more or to go in search of their own stories - if this is my only contribution to the industry then I’d be satisfied knowing that I got someone engaged not through telling them what to drink or what they shouldn’t but instead to open people up to what is inside a bottle alongside its liquid.

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Besides, lots of people seem to be flapping at the state of wine sales - sinking year on year not least because fewer and fewer people drink, specifically younger generations. I’m no statistician, so I can’t tell you each and every cause for wine sales declining, but I am young and I do drink wine. Personally, I think a large reason for young people moving away from wine is the longstanding rhetoric surrounding the wines that they find interesting and like to drink. Having graduated from supermarket wines, where your tastes are likely shaped by the supermarket who are in turn shaped by their buyers and what they think that you “the consumer” like, you have few options available to you. You can either go the classical route, the sort of wine that Noble Rot put on their wine list as the ones that “your Uncle Howard enjoys”. Your parents/aunts/uncles/grandparents drink claret/rhone reds/pinot noir so why don’t you? However, the graduation from supermarket wines usually coincides with not wanting to emulate the “Uncle Howard” figures in your life. Besides, these wines are either quite austere, expensive and aged, three things that don’t lend themselves to finding wines easy to buy and and easy to drink. Or they are supermarket wines that offer a perfectly serviceable drink for your glass, but simultaneously keep you wondering what is wine beyond the supermarket shelves…

What are your other options? Oh, there’s this thing called “natural wine” and lots of young people drink it. “natural wine??” your Uncle Howard asks, looking at you as if you’ve just bought a pair of velcro shoes with lights that flash when you stomp the ground. “the stuff smells like nail polish remover and looks like it could clog a drain (or whatever hyperbole happens to be in season)?” he continues…

Why does your uncle Howard think this? I think it’s because a lot of wine media focused on the risks and problems associated with “natural” wines for quite a long time. There definitely are a lot of problems and risks that go hand in hand with the cloud of techniques and practices that is labelled natural. However, there are definitely problems and risks associated with wines that are labelled conventional as well. In many explainers of “What is natural wine?” comparisons to cider/kombucha/sour beer often get thrown around. In of themselves, not a bad thing. Though using simple language to describe complex problems is probably going to lead to people cherry picking ideas to support their claims and end up telling themselves that all natural wine tastes like kombucha. Besides, in the UK especially, there seems to be great affinity with labels. Someone never just “cycles to work” or “goes on a run” or “rarely eats meat”, they are “a cyclist”, “a runner”, or “a vegetarian”. It becomes an identity that is forced upon them. Once they stop engaging with whatever has been put upon them, the label evaporates. You are either a natural wine drinker or you think its all a load of nonsense - even if natural wine isn’t so clearly defined. Stevie Stacionis lays out why this is more of an issue with the term “natural” and what we can do about it on their substack.

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Now, don’t get me wrong, the term “natural wine” is also really bad. It exists in a weird place where it isn’t legally defined yet lots of people use it in passing and sometimes on a label. If it was legally defined then their would likely be a large group of producers who would want to meet any requirements doing the bare minimum just to get the stamp, much like with EU organics - to which some people are understandably opposed. Some of the natural wine events I’ve attended also rank amongst some of the worst I’ve been to. This is definitely not a comment on the wines nor have I attended a large volume of natural wine events but I did get a sense that the anti-establishment, underground, cult like following that isn’t uncommon for natural wine producers leads to events where people begin to start trying wines just to say they’ve tried them instead of trying to find something new or exciting they otherwise wouldn’t’ve (not to say that is the sole purpose of wine events).

I also think that there is a standard human thought process that directly links amount of coverage to relevance that is a big player in wines. Many wine outlets in the UK will have sections on en primeur campaigns, vintage reports and separate “fine wine” sections. These are probably very useful to whoever uses them, but I personally don’t think that they are as relevant as they might appear to the consumer to be. I’m not saying that lots of people write for the general consumer about buying en primeur, but I do think that people will see mentions of it and mentions of which year is a good year and think that these things have a serious impact on their consumption when really they don’t. A wine will change year on year, its good to know that, but for someone who appreciates wine without having formal training, I personally don’t think that a “bad” year should have such a prominent position on the stage of their enjoyment

What seems clear to me though is that focusing only on the value and potential of wines instead of the stories behind them starts to drive a gap between the consumer and producer and this is something that I think young drinkers might potentially like to see brought back together. The world is full of fantasy and abstraction already, there are millions of hours of videos for us to watch online of people we have never met fixing homes that we will never visit, or writers on substack starting every article with images that have never before existed but come into this world via AI (you will get none of that here).

When we do spend our money and our time on things in bottles, it should serve as an opportunity to connect with the world. With the person who has made the wine, we may not know them personally but we are physically drinking their wine. In his essay The Pleasures of Eating, Wendell Berry reaffirmed:

“Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.”

Framing wine as purely a financial tool never to be enjoyed, vintages as “problematic” is akin to denying that you are “in the world”. This is what drives me to tell these stories, to bring people into the world. No wine scores, no diktats telling what you should and shouldn’t drink, just curiosities that often left out of wine books, travel guides and vintage reports

The stories don’t come exclusively from so-called “natural” producers and nor will I stick exclusively to writing about such producers. People who have good stories can also make bad wines and ciders though I don’t think I will dwell on these too long, not because I don’t believe that they exist, but because I would hate for some recent graduate of gastronomic sciences to do the same to whatever I end up putting in a bottle in 15 years’ time…

So the most well known regions, appellations and producers all have many volumes written about them already. Instead, I want to shed light on some of the more obscure parts of cider and wine and cultures surrounding them. Along with presenting the stories behind some of the producers, I intend for this substack to platform varieties that get little more than a sentence in wine guides, half forgotten appellations and where to find them.

NB: If I’ve already managed to piss you off with something I’ve written then I do apologise. It definitely wasn’t my intention so please be nice. If you aren’t nice I will have to presume you didn’t read this at the bottom of the article and therefore haven’t read everything i’ve written:)

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