Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Cefalicchio* (Rosso Canosa, also the very good
Rosato Ponte della Lama), and Villa Schinosa.
another. “It's a nice story,” she tells me. “I
remember that the Uvalino harvest was always
one big party, it was the last grape we picked,
around November 11 for the San Martino feast
. . . there wasn't much of it, but all the local
families owned a row or two of it and so we all
used to get together and just make a fun day of
it.” However, Uvalino was far from being an
afterthought or a game: everyone considered
uvalino a very important and high-quality wine
(no doubt in part due to its rarity), and it was
added to other wines to supply backbone and
power. In an example of how truly enlightened
Borio is, her estate still sponsors scholarships
for enology graduates who are interested in
studying Uvalino. “It's also an extremely resis-
tant variety. We have left it to air-dry well into
February, and it never rots,” she says.
According to Borio, who has studied Uvalino
long and hard, fi rst with the help of Professor
Corino (then director of the Istituto Sperimen-
tale Enologia di Asti) and then with other lumi-
naries, Uvalino belongs to a family of grapes
once known as
uvari,
or “uve rare” (rare grapes).
The name of the grape was actually Uvarino; in
the local Astigiano dialect, the
r
is rarely if ever
pronounced, and hence Uvalino is the way eve-
ryone refers to it, though it's not technically
correct. The
-ino
ending, however, is
not
a
diminutive, for there is very little
-ino
about this
grape. In fact, Uvalino yields high-acid, brutally
tannic wines that are quite a mouthful. Unfor-
tunately, Uvalino fell out of favor mainly
because of its very late ripening season (as
much as twenty or thirty days after all the other
local grapes), which made it more diffi cult to
work with: obviously, local farmers preferred
working with other grapes that more or less
could all be picked at the same time.
Though Borio is the main producer of
Uvalino today, she is quick to point out that
many other producers have tried their hand at it
too; for example, the great, late Renato Ratti
planted it at Villa Pattono. “But I don't know
what it came to,” she wonders. Nevertheless,
Borio's faith never wavered. Even though
Uvalino wasn't an allowed variety when she
Uvalino
where it's found:
Piedmont.
national reg-
istry code number:
370.
color:
red.
This very rare cultivar is also known as Lam-
brusca or Lambruschino in the Roero, which is
unfortunate, as these varieties are unrelated
and distinct, though perhaps reasonable
enough in that Uvalino, like the
Lambrusco
vari-
eties, is a very hardy, rustic cultivar. It is also
unrelated to Lambrusca di Alessandria, another
native variety of Piedmont that is also distinct
from the better-known
Lambrusco
s of Emilia-
Romagna. In reality, Uvalino is the name used
for this variety in the Astigiano, while in the
Canavese it is called Curnaiola; and while I fi nd
that Uvalino looks a little like Neretto di
Marengo (yet another rare Piedmontese vari-
ety), the two are also distinct (Uvalino has an
obviously much longer bunch, is less loosely
packed, and has smaller leaves). A recent study
analyzed nuclear microsatellites on several
grapes from Piedmont, all named variations on
Lambrusca or Lambrusco, including Uvalino
(or Lambruschino), Lambrusca di Alessandria,
Lambrusca Vittona, and Lambruschetto
(Torello Marinoni, Raimondi, Boccacci, and
Schneider 2006). Twenty SSR loci were used
for DNA typing, and the genetic profi les were
compared to those of other grapes from Pied-
mont and of the well-known
Lambrusco
s from
Emilia-Romagna. The results showed fi rst-
degree parentage relationships between Uvali-
no and Neretto di Marengo, but the
Lambrusco
s
from Emilia-Romagna were genetically distant.
We have a beautiful and sweet lady to thank
for the opportunity to taste and drink an
uvalino today. Maria Borio, owner of the
Cascina Castlèt in Piedmont, at Costigliole
d'Asti, a person for whom time seems to have
stood still (“everyone on my mother's side
seems to live forever, ninety plus and more,”
she laughs), began working at the family estate
in the 1970s and has gone from one success to
