Fall Pleasures of Piedmont

For some people (I am not one of them), the best part of a trip is the planning. Months beforehand, the books pile up by the bed, notebooks are scribbled with names and addresses, elaborate itineraries are plotted day by day. To me, it all sounds exhausting and likely to induce deja vu. What I want is to experience everything fresh.

My usual plan is to just arrive. And figure it out from there. Because no matter how much you know about a place beforehand, there’s no predicting what will move you. When I first visited Italy, it immediately felt more familiar than home. I loved the wild chaotic joy of it. Venice, that overrun destination, took me by stealth. Out of season, in deepest winter, the tap of unseen footsteps, the soft slap of water against mossy old palazzos and the grinding of a vaporetto’s engine conjure the city muffled in fog, its colors blurred. I was ready to throw over everything and move there--until I found that summer couldn’t be more different. Austere Florence, on the other hand, which I’d counted on evoking feelings just as passionate, left me cold. It’s a city and a landscape that doesn’t invite intimacy unless you’re prepared to settle in and stay a while.

No, when I daydream about Italy, it’s the hill towns and vineyards of Piedmont in northwest Italy that engage my reverie. This verdant region produces two of the greatest wines in Italy, Barbaresco and Barolo, yet it is still relatively unknown, except by serious wine lovers.

I knew almost nothing about this corner of Italy when I impulsively decided to make a few days’ detour there in the early ‘80s. In the grips of a mania for these long-lived red wines with their heady scents of leather and tar and violets, I’d been collecting bottles of great Barbaresco and Barolo, the older the better, at wine shops all over Italy. Nebbiolo, the grape from which these wines are made, is unique to Piedmont. It bears no resemblance to the grapes that go into Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir or Syrah, or even the Sangiovese that makes Tuscany’s best wines. I wanted to see where these wines came from and to meet some of the wine makers. Not to mention pick up a few more bottles for my stash.

What I didn’t expect was how smitten I’d be with the cuisine (who had ever heard of Piedmontese food at the time?), by the colors and contours of the landscape and, most of all, by the wine makers and cooks I met along the way. Piedmont may not have the monuments and art of Tuscany or Umbria, yet this region, where the older generation still speaks in a dialect related to the langue d’oc of southern France, draws me back again and again.

Late fall is the most beautiful time of year to visit Piedmont. The name comes from pie dimonte--foot of the mountains--and on a clear fall day, it’s as if an unseen hand lifts the curtain of haze to reveal the foothills ringed by the snowcapped peaks of Monte Viso and the Maritime Alps. From the ridges of the hills, you can see the meandering path of the Tanaro River and the narrow valleys, one behind the other, dotted with the medieval hill towns of Barbaresco, Barolo, Monforte d’Alba, Castiglione Falletto and Serralunga, each crowned with a castle or tower rising from a sea of carefully tended vines.

By late September, the vines are freighted with heavy bunches of nebbiolo, which takes its name from the fog that often enshrouds the vineyards in October, when the late-ripening grapes are harvested. The excitement is infectious as sleepy villages move into high gear. Once the grapes are picked, vineyards turn into a brilliant mosaic of red, orange, yellow and burgundy--a different shade for each of the varieties planted on the slopes.

Piedmont is not that far out of the way, really, just a two-hour drive southwest of Milan. But it’s only in the past five years or so that tourists, mostly wine aficionados from Germany or Switzerland, have arrived in any number to eat and drink for a weekend. There’s not much else to do. But since the food and wine happen to be some of the best in all of Italy, that’s reason enough.

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The first time I came here in late fall, I followed signs for Turin, then Asti and Alba in a driving rain. In Alba, I circled around a small piazza and took a room in the first hotel I found. The rain let up enough for a stroll down the main street, past fancy pastry shops and boutiques (because of its wines, chocolate and textiles, Alba is one of the richest little cities in Italy). I stood gazing at the gap-toothed bricks of the 13th century Church of the Maddalena and only minutes later arrived in Piazza del Duomo, where I stopped in to the 19th century Caffe Calissano for an aperitif. From the phones at the back, I tried the number an Italian friend had pressed into my hand the day before. It was for the restaurant La Contea in Neive d’Alba.

On the old road over the hills to Barbaresco, I couldn’t see much in the dark, just vineyards planted on steep slopes and the occasional sight of garish new farmhouses or crumbling older brick buildings with green shutters and graceful ironwork balconies. My headlights caught end-of-season kitchen gardens and dahlias big as plates. Just past Barbaresco and its 10th century tower, I saw Neive d’Alba--a pink medieval hill town across fields of vines.

Dinner at La Contea that night was enchanting, seated in the dining room of the down-at-the-heels 17th century palazzo lit only by candlelight. The ceiling was painted with intricate designs, the gilt wallpaper faded and the doors were a little wonky. Claudia Verro was in the kitchen in her flat cap and chef’s whites, while her husband, Tonino, decanted prized old Barbarescos and Barolos into crystal carafes.

That October night was my first taste of Piedmontese food: superb carne cruda (hand-chopped raw veal with just a drop of lemon and olive oil), tajerin (golden hand-cut noodles made with 30 egg yolks to a kilo of flour) tossed in melted butter and covered with a drift of white truffles, roasted blood-rare pigeon and Claudia’s homey bunet, a loaf-shaped coffee custard.

When I found out La Contea had a few simple rooms upstairs with shared bath, I moved out of my cheerless hotel room. Staying at La Contea was wonderful then, before the restaurant lost its innocence and went pretentious. It functioned as the town bar, and on early fall mornings when you came down for cappuccino and some of Claudia’s little cornmeal biscotti, you’d find bleary-eyed truffle hunters warming themselves by the fire. Fifteen years later, the restaurant has won and lost a Michelin star, and the dining room is filled not with locals, but tourists.

In Barbaresco, I met Angelo Gaja, who single-handedly focused the wine world’s attention on Piedmont with his stunning single-vineyard Barbarescos Sor 3/8 Tilden and Sor 3/8 San Lorenzo. Not to mention his Cabernet called Darmagi--”what a pity!”--for the lament his father uttered every time he looked out and saw the vineyard where nebbiolo grapes had been uprooted to make way for the interloping French varietal. But Gaja proved his point in tasting after tasting against Bordeaux and California Cabs: Piedmont is capable of making wines on a level with the best in the world. And they’re priced accordingly, though they’re more affordable in Piedmont restaurants.

A short stroll away is Trattoria Antica Torre, where Cinto Albarello makes the best restaurant tajerin in all of Piedmont, hand-cut fine as angel hair and sauced with a light veal ragu. It was over lunch there that Gaja and I began the first of many long conversations about Piedmont and its traditions. He gave me the name of Silvio Brarda, a butcher in Cavour who makes incredible salami infused with Barbaresco. He told me where to find Romano Levi, who’s called grappaiolo d’angeli--grappa maker for the angels. And he told me about restaurants, too, everything from a trattoria, where the specialty is rabbit with peppers and open only by arrangement, to Michelin-starred restaurants that would require a serious detour. But I can’t stay for two weeks, I pleaded.

Then go to Da Guido in Costigliole d’Asti, he advised. A 20-minute drive from Barbaresco, it didn’t look very promising from the outside. But no one comes here for the decor; they come for Lidia Alciati’s astonishing Piedmontese cooking. She’s been at the stoves for more than 30 years, cooking every dish herself, with the exception of the exquisite desserts made by her son Ugo.

I remember every bite of that meal (and of every meal I’ve had there subsequently). The intoxicating aroma of fist-sized truffles on a table in the middle of the 36-seat dining room permeated the place. Her fixed-price menu that night included a sumptuous duck liver mousse, a wild mushroom soup shocked with egg yolks and Parmesan and an ancient dish of salt cod and potatoes. Her ethereal agnolotti were stuffed with bitter greens and chopped roasted veal, pork and rabbit, sauced only in a little butter and meat juices. Brasato al barolo, veal braised in an older bottle of Barolo, was so tender you could cut it with a spoon. We raided the celebrated cellar of her husband, Guido, too, and drank some wonderful Barbarescos and Barolos from the legendary 1964 vintage.

It was the late Guido, in fact, who had persuaded the wine growers of Produttori del Barbaresco, the local cooperative, to bottle their historic crus apart, the better to show off the characteristics of favored vineyard sites. Their Asili, Moccagatta, Ovello and Rabaja crus are among the top wine bargains in Piedmont. Sixty-one families make up what may be the world’s best wine cooperative, whose origins date back to the late 19th century. And though some families may have only a few rows of vines, collectively the Produttori owns more than half the top vineyards in the tiny appellation of Barbaresco.

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A few days later, I found myself standing in front of Romano Levi’s distillery in Neive, stamping my feet in the snow, waiting for the elfin grappa maker to come and open the heavy iron gate. A sweetly eccentric figure, Levi is one of the last grappaioli in Italy to distill by the tricky direct-fire method. And there it stood, a medieval-looking copper caldron, belching and hissing steam. His grappa, made from the grape pressings of some of Piedmont’s top vineyards, ages in a series of old oak barrels. Taste, he urges, handing me a small glass vial to lower into the barrel on a string. It’s harsh, fiery stuff, yet it sells for as much as $30 a glass at Italian restaurants in Los Angeles and New York.

In his unheated office strung with cobwebs, Romano takes out his colored inks and draws each label by hand. If you ask to buy a bottle, he never has one ready, but he’ll put a stone in a pocket already bulging with stones to remind him. It’s worth waiting, even coming back two or three times, to get a bottle labeled with his wonderfully whimsical drawings and sayings.

One afternoon, I visited a rosy-faced truffle hunter who lived on a back road near Treiso, next to Barbaresco. His clothes smelled of truffles. His entire house was filled with their haunting musky scent. At up to $1,200 to $1,500 a pound, the white truffle is one of the world’s most expensive and sought-after delicacies. During truffle season, from October until December or January, he and his best truffle dog--an elderly black-and-white pointer named Gepetto--scour the steep, wooded slopes from 11 at night until dawn, when he comes back for breakfast and goes out with another dog, then another. Sleep is an afternoon nap. But you can tell he loves his work and the dogs he trains so patiently as he regales me with stories of truffles found and dogs lost.

On another day I headed to Barolo and the handful of hill towns that make up the Barolo appellation on the other side of Alba, about a half hour’s drive from Barbaresco, to visit Barolo producer Luciano Sandrone. Stocky, intense, he is an anomaly, a stupendously talented wine maker who didn’t grow up in the world of wine (his father was a cabinetmaker) and had to save up to buy a vineyard. When I met him, he was still working for a big commercial producer to make ends meet, and he and his wife were doing all the work themselves in the vineyards and their tiny, garage-sized cellar, even labeling the wines by hand. Today, his supple, gorgeous Barolos have made him a superstar. We sat around a long table that day, munching on hazelnuts and crunchy yard-long grissini (bread sticks). He has a deep and abiding love for the traditions of Piedmont. And he can always tell me about some ice cream maker in a remote town I should visit or a trattoria lost in the hills that still makes certain very old dishes.

Sandrone, like most of the other wine makers I’ve met, is a fan of Cesare Giaccone and his restaurant, da Cesare, in Albaretto Torre, southeast of Barolo. A big compliment, since Cesare is not exactly known for taking the best care of wines: Sometimes bottles are shelved too near the fireplace, where he roasts succulent capretto, young kid basted with rosemary and olive oil. That’s the enticing smell that greeted Sandrone and me as we walked in one day. Cesare cooked all over Europe before coming home to Piedmont to open this unpretentious place. Though very much in the Piedmontese tradition, his cooking is like nothing I’d ever eaten before: “poker” of wild mushrooms prepared five ways, a divine potato baked in the embers and splashed with grappa, guinea fowl roasted under a blanket of gold wheat berries. For dessert, he took a hazelnut branch and replaced the hazelnuts with tiny hazelnut cookies. And when you order truffles, he literally buries your food in truffle shavings.

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Fall in Piedmont has the kind of weather that makes you want to eat. And nowhere else in Italy do you eat so well so consistently. One day I was sitting with Barolo producer Aldo Conterno in his tasting room, discussing the new vintage of his opulent Gran Bussia Barolo and trading names of restaurants. I mentioned Ristorante Cacciatori in Cartosio. Let’s go, we decided.

It turned out to be more of a drive than we bargained for (getting lost didn’t help), through Nizza Monferrato, where if you’re really a fanatic, you can get up and go to the truffle market at 5 a.m., on to the old Roman spa town of Acqui Terme and up into the hills beyond. But it was more than worth the trip for the perfect simplicity of the meal we had there. For the incomparable focaccia dimpled with olive oil and baked in a cast iron skillet in a wood-burning oven. Or a plate of veal carpaccio covered with fine slices of porcini mushrooms straight from the forest. At Cacciatori, as at most Piedmontese restaurants, antipasti are served in a series of courses: cima (stuffed veal breast), light puffs of deep-fried ravioli, artichoke tart. Chicken cacciatori, cooked on top of the wood-burning stove, was positively regal. And for dessert, there was a tart of apples and pine nuts and homemade apricot jam. Maria Milano, who shares the cooking with her daughter-in-law, Carla, has been lighting that stove first thing each morning since the late ‘30s. I love to watch the two of them in the mornings, cats basking on the windowsill outside the kitchen window as the two women face each other across the cutting board. The family has a dozen comfortable rooms for rent upstairs, making it a good place to relax for a couple of days and experience one of Italy’s great trattorias.

For 15 years, I’ve managed to find some excuse to visit Piedmont almost every year. At first it was because it was an easy stopover on the way from France to Tuscany or Umbria by way of Nice, a leisurely morning’s drive across the border and up through Liguria on roads that parallel the strada di sale, the twisting old salt route through the mountain passes where Ligurians and Piedmontese used to meet to exchange salted anchovies, olives and limpid gold-green olive oil for wine, flour and mountain cheeses. And then Piedmont became a kind of obsession, to go back and taste the new wines, to eat another plate of startling gold tajerin lavished with white truffles, to try that trattoria I never got to on my last visit, to go to the market with Cesare or take yet another agnolotti lesson from the patient Lidia. My agnolotti are not bad, but there’s still something that eludes me. . . .

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Guidebook: Vintage Piedmont

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Italy is 39. All prices are approximate and computed at a rate of 1630 lire to the dollar. Room rates are for a double for one night. Dinner prices are approximate for two people, not including wine, cheese or truffles.

Getting there: The closest international airport to Alba, the best place to base yourself in the Piedmont region, is Turin, about a 75-minute drive by autostrada; however, there are no direct flights to Turin from Los Angeles. It’s more convenient to fly into Milan, where most major international airlines fly, and rent a car for the two-hour drive to Alba. It’s almost impossible to get around Piedmont’s wine country without one, and major car rental agencies are represented at Milan and Turin.

Where to stay: In Agliano d’Asti, Albergo San Giacomo, telephone and fax 141-966-012. A beautifully decorated and luxurious six-room hotel run by the Alciati family of the two-star restaurant Da Guido. Rate: $159, breakfast included. Cascina Reine, tel. 173-440-112, no fax. On the outskirts of Alba, a charming bed and breakfast in an old farmhouse with five rooms and two suites. Owner Giuliana Giacosa is a good country cook who will prepare meals for guests upon request. Rates: $67-$80, breakfast included. Hotel Barbabuc, tel. 173-731-298. A family-run 10-room hotel furnished with antiques and contemporary furniture, five minutes south of Barolo in Novello. Rate: $110, with breakfast. I Castelli, tel. 173-361-978, fax 173-361-974. A new four-star hotel at the edge of Alba’s historic center. Rate: $104.

Where to eat: Cascinalenuovo, tel. 141-958-166. This small, modern hotel in Isola d’Asti has an excellent restaurant featuring the contemporary cooking of young Walter Ferretto; $98. Da Guido, tel. 141-966-012. Go to Costigliole d’Asti to taste Lidia Alciati’s glorious Piedmontese cooking and old vintages from the restaurant’s celebrated cellar. Dinner by reservation only. Closed Sundays. Fixed-price menu, $135. Ristorante Cacciatori, tel. 144-401-23. Extraordinary country restaurant in Cartosio with a dozen simple but comfortable rooms with bath. Rate: $55. Dinner, $67. Closed Thursday. Ristorante da Cesare, tel. 173-520-141. Exciting, original cooking from Cesare Giaccone. Closed Tuesday, Wednesday lunch; $110-$150. Ristorante Moderno, tel. 173-75-493. Rustic restaurant about 45 minutes from Alba specializing in bollito misto, superb mixed boiled meats, with all the fixings. Closed Monday evening and Tuesday; $55. Trattoria Antica Torre, tel. 173-635-170. This is the place for tajerin in Barbaresco. Closed Sunday evening and Monday; $50.

For more information: Italian Government Tourist Board, 12400 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 550, Los Angeles, 90025; tel. (310) 820-0098, fax (310) 820-6357.