Carema wine in Luigi Ferrando's memories

Twelve years ago, when I interviewed Luigi Ferrando, winegrower and producer of Carema wine, I was taking my first steps along the Nebbiolo trail. In those days I already had in mind to build a sensory journey from Langhe to Valtellina, not yet for a book of course, but for a wine tasting. Therefore I planned to present nine wines which could tell the public the various souls of that extraordinary grape. Among those wines was Ferrando's Carema DOC Etichetta Nera (Black Label) 2004, 100% Nebbiolo grapes, one of the four original wines that have remained in my book as well as in my heart.

I was immediately struck by Luigi Ferrando's sympathy. He was a smiling and ironic man who loved to tell stories about himself and his world. He took me by the hand through memories and landscapes unknown to me with an enviable lightness, chasing away the melancholy always lurking with the light-hearted tone of someone who never takes himself fully seriously.

That interview was to good to keep it all to myself. So I have decided to post it here, so that anyone could read it…

Credits: Famiglia Ferrando

INTERVIEW WITH LUIGI FERRANDO (Ivrea, 7th July 2010)

When was this company founded?

In 1890. With my son Roberto we are now at the fifth generation dealing with wine. In those days the Ferrando were wine merchants, originally from Acqui Terme, in southern Piedmont. They had moved to Ivrea because they wanted to market Piedmontese wines in the Aosta Valley. Today I am still considered a stranger, a foreigner... Can you believe that? Complete nonsense! We remained traders until the 1950s. Then, in 1957, my father Giuseppe and I fell in love with Carema and we started growing Nebbiolo vines and making Carema wine...

Were the vines already there or did you plant them?

No, they were already there. Have you ever been to Carema?

No. Not yet.

When you go there, you will see it with your own eyes. The vines have not been planted: they have always been there since Roman times ... Traditionally, the pergola is a Roman way of growing a vine. When the soldiers retired, the Romans offered 30 hectares (74 acres) only to those who stopped, and this gave them the opportunity to live in this territory. For the Romans it was important, because the Roman culture settled in the places where vines could survive in order to counter the wolves ... (he chuckles). In other words, to delimit the wildeness areas… Even here on the Serra of Ivrea (a morainic relief of glacial origin dating back to the Quaternary) the Erbaluce vines are all grown with pergola, but there, in Carema, there are also those Doric columns, made of stone, you know, right? There was ... – I am so bad with names... – a papal messenger who studied the whole history of the vines in northern Italy ...

Sante Lancerio, I guess ...

Yes, really him!

In 1539 he was the personal cellarman of Pope Paul III Farnese. It is thanks to him that we know that the red wines produced here in the Canavese area, which were certainly Nebbiolo-based, were highly appreciated by the Pope.

He spoke of Carema wines, and then of two wine-growing areas of the Canavese. One was the area of ​​Caluso, the other was the Cappellina farmhouse, which must have been in the surroundings of Ivrea. We went crazy figuring out where it was, and finally we found out...

Where was it?

In Bollengo! But we weren't sure, and so we planted some Nebbiolo vines, in order to understand whether the Cappellina farmhouse had been really there, because there is nothing left now ... It was owned by the Counts of Valperga, ten kilometers from Ivrea. It's an ancient story, you know? The chapel is still there, but everything has gone down the drain. They moved to another castle, and began to live the good life ... A friend of mine bought himself a house right there, above Bollengo, and I convinced him to plant a piece of vineyard with “Nebbiolo di Carema”, a local type of Nebbiolo called picotendro or picoutener. Now I'm curious to see the results, because this is the third year of implantation and technically it should produce something. Ah, that's fantastic...

How many hectares do you own in Carema?

About 2 hectares (4,9 acres) of Nebbiolo, with a yield of 400 kilos per hectare. They are old vines, there is no habit of uprooting and replanting: the plants are replaced as they die ...

So it's hard to tell how old the vines are ...

Well ... The average age ranges from 25 to 35 years. Then, in the middle of a vineyard, which may be 150 square meters ...

What do you mean with “150 meters square”???

Well, you must know that in Carema there are lots of tiny terraces perched on the steep slope which belong to different owners. An owner can have a thousand square meters of vineyard divided into ten different parcels, and it takes him so long to move from place to place to do the work that in the end he spends more than he earns. And this is a big problem. This is also why the yields are low: on such dimensions there is no possibility of producing more. The soil is what it is, then the soil blocked by stone walls is not backfill soil, and then it is very little, there is a lot of rock underneath ...

Does Nebbiolo run with its branches?

Of course it runs! The pergola was born to make the vineyard run! It has been like this for at least five hundred years! It's not like you can make it go back, as in the Langhe, to 10,000 plants per hectare ... Nebbiolo was built to run. The soil is scarce, the vines need space to move and the winegrower has always tried to make them go where he could, because, if he keeps them low, here there is no possibility to ripen the grapes ... Now someone has begun to cut shorter and no longer runs the shoot ten meters far from the trunk. However, I am not so sure that it works.

Just to understand. What distances are there between the vines?

About three meters one from another... Yes but, my dear, three meters in Carema don't mean anything ... Each vine is three meters far from another, but the fruit is maybe ten meters far, on someone else’s terrace. It is really a different setting of the territory. All the mountaineers had to find a solution for the vine to expand, take air and light everywhere. If the vines were kept low, producing grapes against these walls would be impossible: there would be no space.

How are the vines oriented?

It depends. South. Southwest. Carema is a basin at the entrance to the Aosta Valley, a kind of funnel dug in the mountains. There is a very special microclimate. Then, Carema is very small. In 1967, when together with all the great Piedmontese Nebbiolo wines they made the DOC Carema, there were 33 hectares (81,5 acres); today about 16 hectares (39,5 acres) remain, and they are gradually decreasing. The wood is slowly descending, and every year it incorporates more and more terraces... It is a viticulture that must be done by hand, and which requires a lot of manpower.

Credits: Marzia Pinotti (2019)

Is land fragmentation a widespread phenomenon?

Yes, it is. In fact, the situation is unmanageable. All the Carema families own various vineyard plots, and are very jealous of their land. More and more frequently they are no longer able to work the vines but, rather than giving them to others, they abandon them and this is another big problem ... Since there are many abandoned lands among others still cultivated, around these brambles grow. It's a huge mess, but we hold on, that’s how it goes. We have always relied on some Carema families, with a system that guarantees us a quality of production on site, which otherwise would be impossible.

Do you have a contract with these families?

Yes, we do. For decades now, and this gives us the guarantee of those hectares ... It happens that someone passes away, and that the vineyards go in succession, maybe they are three brothers, two want to keep them and the other does not .. In the mountains it is a disaster. Sometimes you talk for hours, but they don't understand you ... We like to work, move, have ideas, try to improve ourselves, but then at some point we realize that they are really afraid ...

What does it mean for you to produce Carema wine?

A great sacrifice, but also a great satisfaction when I then see the final results: sometimes it seems impossible that a great quality wine can come out from 30 centimeters (11,8 inches) of topsoil over the rocky ground, but then I realize that it is precisely that soil that makes the wine unique. It is something that only we have ... Because Carema wine is a little gem. It's nice to reach the top of national oenology with the smallest DOC in Italy ... But the question is: why no one, apart from us, supports the territory? There, in Carema, Nebbiolo grape has found its homeland, but it is hard to grow it because, if in the Langhe it takes 500 hours of work to cultivate a hectare (2,47 acres) of vineyard, in Carema it takes at least 2000 ...

Two-thousand??? You must believe in it a lot!

Oh yes ... Of course, if Roberto had not continued, I would have stopped ten years ago, because it is not possible to work in these conditions. I am seventy years old. Up to sixty-five I could still work hard, but now all the weight is on his shoulders ... Fortunately, Roberto is very tough... And, fortunately, to support him financially, there is the Erbaluce wine. The satisfaction of seeing Ferrando wine qualified at the highest level is incomparable. It is the pleasure of doing something that remains, and of seeing people talk about it. Among other things, we recently learned that Robert Parker gave 93/100 to the Carema Etichetta Nera (Black Label) and 90/100 to the Carema Etichetta Bianca (White Label) ... He, the Parker, is one of those that I have always a little ... I mean, his favorite wines have always been those produced in Tuscany, Supertuscans, Cabernet Sauvignon, that kind of wine… We have never been “mainstream”, you know? Our wines were far from the so-called “international taste”. From the beginning we have kept producing wines that people didn't even know what they were ... We struggled a lot, you know? Just think that in 1964 we still bought wine from winegrowers. We only started pressing grapes in the cellar in 1967 ...

How come?

There were no roads here. We went in a van up to the middle of the town, until I bought 200 meters (656 feet) of rubber to bring the wine down to the cellar of this dear friend of mine, because otherwise you had to carry everything down in the brenta. You know what a brenta is, right?

Yes. Since a brenta is a unit of measure, I guess it’s a sort of basket containing 50 liters ...

It took half a day to load 500 liters. It was another world ...

What world was it?

It was a world still tied to traditions, which at times were just absurd. Civilization had not yet arrived in Carema. There were no roads, there were only mule tracks. They went up with the mules, and with the baskets on their backs. For them the problem of winemaking was also that ... They took three, four, even five days to fill a 15-hectolitre fermentation tank, and then, in the end, the wine tasted like vinegar ... For years the locals continued to think that that flavor was a characteristic of Carema wines, and this created big problems, because people went up to buy a demijohn and, when they took it home, how so? The wine had become vinegar ... I told them not to, but nothing, they kept throwing grapes into the same container for four or five days... But there’s more. Harvest season in Carema runs from mid-October onwards. It was freezing cold. The crushing there was done with naked men inside the barrel, and believe me, at zero degrees you can’t send naked men into the barrel. Then you had to wait for the temperature to go to 16-17 degrees ...

Which is a perfect temperature for the volatile to form.

That's right! This situation lasted at least until some technology arrived and the first roads were built in order to speed up the pace. At that point, all the “strange” vineyards disappeared, like my friend's, who took 35 minutes to go up, take 50 kilos of grapes and bring them down. Do you understand? Carema is 300 meters (984 feet) high, but his vineyard was at almost 700 meters (2997 feet) high. Since then all those vineyards have been abandoned, while the ones you could reach with the three-wheeler are still cultivated…

At what altitude are the vineyards?

I don't know, maybe the highest reaches 500 meters (1640 feet) above the sea level... Now the highest are those behind Pin's house ... Ours must be about 380 (1247f), 400 (1312) meters high.

In Carema you produce two wines, the White Label and the Black Label. Where do you pick grapes for the Black Label?

There is no specific place. It only comes out in important vintages ...

In short, it is a Reserve...

No, it isn’t. Wait a minute. When I made these two wines, in 1962, there was no possibility of writing the word Riserva on the label. That’s why we invented the Black Label ...

How so?

Well. The Cantina Sociale di Carema (which produces 90% of Carema wine while we only produce 10% of it) has made it so that, in order to write Riserva, it is not only necessary to bottle the wine in Carema, but also to store it there for a year. But our winery has always been in Ivrea. We could not. With the Black Label we have solved the problem. We try to shift its release by one year with respect to the White Label. For many years the problem was being able to produce both. In recent years it has been easy, but in those years, between the 1960s and 1970s, it was hard: we did the Black Label four years out of ten ...

Credits: Marzia Pinotti (2019)

Are there any crus in Carema?

No, madam, in Carema you cannot make single vineyard wines, because when you have a ten square meter vineyard, eh eh ... One day a dear friend of mine (unfortunately he passed away many years ago) told me: "I sold the vineyard!". So I replied: "You could have told me, I would have bought it, right?". "Ah," he said, "it was 20 square meters: they built a nice garage in it ...". Do you understand? Mountain people have a monstrous pleasure in owing the land. The smartest of all were the Germans who have always said: Farm closed! The first-born child takes everything. Others do what they can, but the land remains all together. Here the vineyards of one hectare, in four or five generations, have become 250 square meters ... Ah, people living in the mountains are terrible ... For many years, I made fun of the Germans, it seemed unfair, but then, when you get involved, you realize that it is a very wise choice ...

When did this start?

A long time ago. Cavalier Domatti, the one who made this beautiful bottle (you see? Carema 1906… he also took prizes...)  owned a two-hectare vineyard, built by Canavese masons, who worked in Switzerland in the summer, while in winter they came back here and, with room and board, tidied up the vineyards. They are cyclopean works ... That is the last vineyard I saw untouched, up to twenty years ago. Then, I began to see the uncle, the cousin, the nephew ... Oh, that too is now abandoned ... And then they quarrel between brothers ... The problem is that everyone has got another job, even 40 kilometers (25 miles) far from there. When they come home, they don't feel like working in the vineyard anymore. There is still someone who does it but...

Up to a certain point, however, it was possible ...

Yes, it was. Once in Pont-Saint-Martin, two kilometers from Carema, there was the large ENEL power plant and all these people, who worked shifts, once they got out of work, immediately returned home to work the vineyard. Then, with the arrival of Adriano Olivetti and his IT company, people started coming down to Ivrea. Then Olivetti moved first to Sant’Armando, then to Scarmagno, and slowly the return times changed. Then the companies started to slow down, the schedules changed, and this influenced the construction of the vineyards, not only in Carema, but also in the Canavese area, because in some areas it was preferred to exchange hillside vineyards with those of the plains. Many have bought a 100 HP tractor and, when they come back from work, they work an hour in the vineyard with that monster. On the ground they plant corn or something else, which then surely pays more. If you have to live on the vine, you behave in a certain way, but here 85-90% do not live on the vine and therefore work in the vineyard when they can, and how they can. If you are not passionate, the vineyard consumes you ...

What is the main problem with this area?

The area is too small and there is no visibility. Today, to have visibility, you need to produce about five million bottles, but here, when everyone does their best, we reach a maximum of 1,200,000 bottles. We don't have the opportunity to advertise or travel a lot, but I see people come looking for us anyway. It must be remembered that once Ivrea had 23,000 inhabitants and Olivetti had 15,000 employees. Consider the possibilities of the Olivetti employee compared to the farmer ... The Carema cooperative winery (Cantina Sociale di Carema) and the Piverone cooperative winery (Cantina Sociale di Piverone) were both created by Adriano Olivetti. Of all the things he has created, the two wineries are the only ones that have survived, the rest has all fallen apart. Someone has certainly benefited from it, but the idea of ​​an agriculture linked to the territory through part-time workers, died with him. Here the masons, the farmers, the artisans have disappeared, because everyone went to worked in Olivetti. When we were selling wine, we had four employees, but for years they resigned every six months and we had to constantly replace them. This has impoverished the whole area. Today the Piverone cooperative winery presses about 20,000 hectoliters of wine a year, but thirty or forty years ago it pressed 100,000. It is not that Carema has disappeared, while the other areas have evolved. If you go and check, half of the hills of the Serra are terraced, but the vines have disappeared. In the span of ten, fifteen years, the market collapsed, because there was no product evolution. If you make good wines, you somehow manage to sell them. If instead you make so-so wines, there are other areas where “so-so” costs half as much.

Has Carema wine changed since you first made it with your father?

Well, in the 1960s there were definitely more grapes, and temperatures were lower than today, so those grapes couldn't fully ripen every year. Today it is warmer, we always have splendid ripening, and therefore we arrive in the cellar with a product that is certainly different from the one they had in the past. There used to be much longer macerations. Today the maceration is done well, precisely because we do not want to let out too many tannins, and, when we see that it is time, we go to rack, separating the skins from the liquid. Certainly, in the past the wines were much more acidic. Now they go to England to make champagne. It’s due to climate change.

What about the use of oak barrels?

Oak barrels got smaller and smaller. We once had 55-hectolitre barrels. Today the largest is 21 hectoliters and then we have various formats, from 15 hectoliters to 500-liter tonneau, to 375-liter barriques. The disciplinary provides for a minimum of three years of aging: our wines are aged for 24 months in wood.

Is there a year you feel particularly attached to?

No, because every harvest is somehow special ... I can't talk about wine, but the things that happened in Carema come to mind. The world of wine has been beautiful, it has been beautiful for years. Now it has changed a bit because marketing has now taken over, but perhaps it was the world of winegrowers with few hectares like me that changed, that’s the problem. The world of wine was beautiful because everyone celebrated at any time, linked by wine, by the territory, by friendship. Now I feel a bit lost, because the big producers have become stars. Some, before, were friends. Now, to talk to them, you have to call the secretary for an appointment... Others, like Giacomo Bologna, I lost them many years ago, and all those memories have left their mark. I remember that Giacomo bought two barrels of whiskey when his two children were born. On both occasions I went to his house with Maurizio Zanella, a nonconformist just like Giacomo, and we ate truffles until dawn. One night at Giacomo’s a guy arrived with oysters from Normandy, and we didn’t go home until we ate them all... And how to forget Giorgio Grai? Another unpredictable man, completely unconventional... With him I went to car racing and at night we ran down the hairpin bends at breakneck speed... Today I can't even think about it, nowadays I would probably die in a car crash, I know, but at that time it was still possible because a car passed every half hour. Anyway, these three are the men who influenced me by telling me what to do with wine. The first time I saw a winery heated in winter, I was with Giorgio Grai in Santa Maddalena, in South Tyrol. “How is it like this?”, I asked him. And he replied: “It is you fools from Piedmont who have cold cellars! This is how good red wine is made!" And then, little by little, I learned a few things ... When they tell us that we are a bit slow to understand, they are right, because it took me ten years to turn on a heater in the cellar after Giorgio had told me... Ten years! And yet, that was the tradition, there was no way, it could not be done. There was not even anyone who listened to you. The world of wines was small, and it was beautiful for that, but it also had limits, because it was very primitive. Yes, in the last forty years technology has evolved a lot, but first of all it is people who have to evolve...

Credits: Famiglia Ferrando