Le Piane
In the 1930s, Alto Piemonte had nearly 75,000 acres under vine, more than Tuscany. Then the textile factories of Novara and Biella offered steadier work than the steep volcanic hillsides above Boca, and the vineyards went back to forest. By the time Christoph Künzli came looking, roughly twenty-five acres remained.
What he found, in 1988, was Antonio Cerri — an octogenarian still making Boca the way it had always been made. Künzli and his partner Alexander Tolf bought Cerri’s vines, his cellar, and his library of old vintages, then spent years clearing parcel after parcel back out of the woods. Tolf was killed in a road accident in 1998; the Meridiana vineyard he replanted, and the yellow house standing in it, became the estate’s emblem. The first Boca under the Le Piane label was the 1999.
Today the estate farms eight hectares, two of them old vines, on porphyry — volcanic rock, not the limestone of the Langhe — at 450 to 550 meters under a cool Alpine climate. Nebbiolo, called Spanna here, with Vespolina for spice and lift. Spontaneous fermentation, no temperature control, large Slavonian casks in Cerri’s original cellar.
Boca is now one of Italy’s smallest appellations, at roughly fifteen hectares in total. Le Piane is a substantial part of the reason it still exists at all.
Getting There: