Roero: Sculpted by the Supernatural, with Devilishly Good Wine

By John Szabo, MS

This feature was commissioned by the EU funded campaign Sip and Savor: Pairing European Wines and Deli Meat 

You can reach the small village of Pocapaglia in less than an hour by car from Turin. Most wine-thirsty tourists will stay longer on the highway, heading further south down to La Morra or Barolo or Monforte d’Alba. But they’ll miss an up-close glimpse of the supernatural forces of nature, and the compelling wines inextricably linked to it.

Pocapaglia is in the Roero region on the left (north) bank of the Tanaro River above the Langhe Hills. It’s one of the best places to see what the locals call “Le Rocche” in all their savage splendor: a series of dramatic cliffs, ragged ravines, and deep fissures that zig-zag southwest to northeast through Roero, roughly splitting it in two. Start, or end your hike along the Gran Sentiero del Roero in the village, a 40 km trail that crosses centuries-old chestnut woods, stretches of water, and dense bushes, and capture the breathtaking views..

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Visually arresting as they are to the modern traveller, according to local folklore, the creation of these preternatural formations is attributed to the Devil himself, too strange and violent to be natural. No, they must be the scars left behind by an angry demon tearing apart the land, or gashes from a supernatural battle between good and evil.

It’s the visual spectacle of Le Rocche that sets Roero apart from the nearby Langhe and Monferrato Hills, giving it a wild, and in some eyes, inhospitable bearing. Indeed, in the past much of this land was considered too steep and difficult to farm, too prone to landslides, unyielding, surely an entrance to the underworld.

Land of Diversity

But what might have seemed a curse centuries ago has turned out to be a blessing. When one travels through the relatively gentle hills of the Barolo or Barbaresco denominazioni, a vast sea of vines spreads out before you, a uniform, monoculture of vitis vinifera covering virtually every hillside and valley, broken only by the hand-hewn rocky outcrops of villages crowning the largest hilltops like islands, and the occasional copse on a north-facing slope.

Roero, by comparison, is a wild and untamed sea, churned up with different colours and textures. It’s a land of forests and gorges, canyons and scraggly rocks, where over 1100 types of vegetation have been recorded, and three dozen species of butterfly flutter and 30 million bees buzz. And where more suave topography permits, you’ll see crops of various kinds: chestnuts and hazelnuts, apricots and plums, peaches, strawberries, asparagus and more, and interspersed with these, often side-by-side, vineyards, too. It’s a compelling enough landscape to have been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, described as a winegrowing landscape that “expresses great aesthetic qualities”, and an “archetype of European vineyards”. 

In Natural Harmony and Balance

In our dawning age of post-industrial agriculture, it has become undeniable that monocultures are generally bad. Reducing natural biodiversity has created less resilient vineyards that are more disease prone, pest-ridden and battered by the whims of extreme weather. And in this sense, Roero was far enough behind the development of its more famous neighbours that now it’s ahead. Winegrowers are scrambling to plant trees and hedgerows in Barolo to bring nature back into balance. In Roero, forests and orchards already occupy far more land than vineyards, and a natural harmony and balance reins over the land.

The hills and valleys, ravines and cliffs of Roero are only supernatural in the popular imagination. Geologically, Le Rocche were formed by the erosion of friable marine sands and clays, the scouring action of the Tanaro River and the countless streams and rivulets that have fed it over millennia.

A Tale of Sands, Clays and Limestones

Over several different geological epochs, this area of northern Italy was the bottom of a sea. The innumerable shells and fossils of sea creatures in Technicolour variety that litter the landscape of Roero tell a tale of sedimentation over long stretches of time and under different conditions; the raised hills speak of subsequent tectonic work to raise the ancient seabed and expose its multiple strata, like a tipped-over slice of cake displaying all its layers.

Some of these layers are more prone to erosion, like the so-called Sands of Asti, the youngest and most widespread soil type in the region, barely sandstones, with little lime or clay to bind the grains together.

Other layers are more resilient, like the “Blue Clays” that were laid down before the sands, composed of an almost even blend of lime, clay, and sand. And even more resistant are the marls, dense, calcareous rocks with little clay or sand, the oldest and hardest of Roero geologies present in only a narrow strip by the Tanaro River, with various names that evoke their place of discovery:  Marne di Sant’Agata Fossili or Conglomerati di Cassano Spinola, for example.

Reading the Land, Understanding the Wine

And these geological epochs are revealed to both the eye and the palate, with great relevance to the wines of Roero. Wander through the region and observe the landscape; the shape of the hills divulges what lies beneath. The sands were easiest for the waters to carve into the steep cliffs and sharp ravines of Le Rocche, not the devil’s work after all. And where the scouring was less violent and the angles not too sharp, the sands yield Roero’s most elegant and refined wines, full of perfume and finesse.

The marls, by contrast, weather slowly and evenly into more rounded hills, gentler to the wine grower. But for the wine drinker, they are the source of wines of great power and structure, depth and spicy character. The blue clays, for their part, represent a sort of middle ground, yielding slightly more angular yet not radically steep hills, and also wines of substantial body and intensity, deeply-coloured and richly aromatic, capable of long cellaring.

Although written records of grape growing and winemaking in Roero stretch back to early 1300s, its development into a prominent appellation in Piedmont would come much later. Roero was granted the denominazione di origine controllata (DOC) status in 1984, and the DOC-Garantita (DOCG) status in 2004, nearly a quarter century after the “garantita” was introduced into Italian wine law. Today, Roero counts some 1340 hectares of vineyards, a number that has climbed 30% in the last decade as growers from within and outside the zone come to recognize its potential as well as the attractive price of land – the devils had successfully warded off curious outsiders, until now.

Roero Rosso

The appellation features two main varieties: nebbiolo is unsurprisingly the red variety that captures the most attention in the region, planted on 355 hectares. It represents at least 95% of the blend for Roero Rosso by law, even if in practice most producers bottle it pure. Nebbiolo is surely the source of many of Piedmont’s, and Italy’s, greatest red wines, though here, the prevalence of the clays and especially the sands gives Roero Rosso a uniquely refined and delicate profile, more approachable in youth.

This is reflected in the production regulations, which permit the sale of Roero Rosso after 16 months in the cellar, of which six months must be in wood, a contrast with the 26 months required for neighboring Barbaresco (9 months in wood) and much less than the 38 months (18 in wood) for basic Barolo. In a world ever-more thirsty for lighter, delicate reds, but also with authentic and with distinctive character, the future for Roero Rosso looks bright and shimmering.

Arneis (with permission from the Consorzio Tutela Roero)

Reneysium: Roero Arneis But it was the white wines of Roero that first put the region on the map, made from the native flagship variety, Arneis. The first written references to the grape date back to the late 15th and early 16th centuries, in the forms Reneysium and Ornesium, and in a mention of a vineyard called “moscatelli et renexij”, likely a reference to what is today known as the Renesio vineyard in the town of Canale in Roero where it is thought Arneis originated. 990 hectares of Arneis are currently planted, about three-quarters of the total surface area.

Considering its popularity now, it’s striking to think that the variety had all but disappeared by the 1960s. A crisis in the wine market  at the turn of the twentieth century reduced Arneis to a table grape status, or worse, to being an interplanted lure to draw hungry birds away from nebbiolo with its sweeter, earlier-ripening nature, often called at the time “nebbiolo bianco”.

The vision of a handful of growers, including Roero producer Giovanni Negro, saved the variety from extinction. By the 1970s and early 1980s, vineyard dedicated to arneis started to spring up, and by the 1990s had been firmly established as the regional flagship grape.

It’s a challenge to grow; “Arneis” means “rascal” in Piedmontese dialect, a recognition of its poor, irregular yields of diminutive bunches with small berries, its disease prone nature and propensity to drop acidity quickly, making it tough to get harvest time right. It also tends to oxidize readily in the cellar, demanding constant care and attention, a real rascal indeed.

And yet, it has more than proven its potential to make memorable wine with the right growing and winemaking care, and of course the appropriate terroir, which Roero enjoys more than anywhere else. At its best, it delivers a subtle but marvelous perfume of chamomile and white flowers, white peach and apricot, citrus and sweet herbs, delicate and soft on the palate. Given its lowish acids, it was thought best consumed young and fresh. That is, until, quite accidentally, some bottles forgotten for several years in a cellar were opened to reveal another face of Arneis, of smoldering complexity and beguiling profile. Not long after, in 2017, the category Roero Arneis Riserva was introduced for wines that have been aged at least 16 months before release. Wood ageing is not stipulated, but is practiced by a handful of growers.

The “Menzione Aggiuntive”

And also in that same year, 2017, in recognition of the vast diversity of soils, elevations, aspects and exposures of the region, the Roero Consorzio made official a list of 134 crus, or menzioni geographiche aggiuntive in local parlance (MGAs), additional geographic mentions as well as 18 districts. Like in neighboring Barolo and Barbaresco, an MGA refers to a delimited vineyard with specific soil and climate characteristics, offering a unique interpretation of the two protagonist varieties. There are no monopoles; one of the stipulations is that there must be at least three producers making wine in any MGA, and they must be a commercially relevant size of at least 10 hectares. All 134 MGAs are on hillsides or hilltops – the valley floor is excluded.

Some take the establishment of crus as a region’s “coming of age” moment. I’ll take it as an opportunity to map out the taste of this fascinating and diverse land, hillside by hillside, wine by wine. And the devil may care.

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That’s all for this report, see you in the new year ’round the next bottle. 

 John Szabo, MS