Fratelli Negri Viticoltori

The Negri winery describes itself as “the result of a dream of three siblings.” Matteo is named as the owner; Fabio and Barbara work alongside him. The vines came down from their grandparents and parents. What changed in 2021 is that the three of them decided to make and bottle the wine themselves, in a small cantina on Via Gibellini in the village.

Their holding is tiny: about 1.8 hectares of Nebbiolo, a few tenths of a hectare of Uva Rara and a scrap of the white Erbaluce, all trained on Guyot. Picking and bottling are both done by hand.

The labels carry family memory. The Uva Rara bears a phrase their grandfather used for a wine that fills the mouth with fruit: La fa gni la buca larga, roughly, it makes your mouth open wide.

La fa gni la buca larga.

The Negri siblings’ grandfather, on the Uva Rara label

Alto Piemonte is Nebbiolo country, like the Langhe, but the ground is different. The Langhe sits on marine marls. Up here, at the foot of the Alps, the Sesia river and the glaciers before it carried down rock from the Valsesia, including porphyry, an ancient volcanic stone, along with schists and rounded river pebbles. The Negri vines grow on clay over a subsoil full of that material, porphyries, schists, metaschists and pebbles, mixed differently in each cru. The vineyards face west and south-west at about 270 metres.

That mineral, acid-rich ground is why northern Nebbiolo tastes as it does: leaner, more fragrant and more saline than Barolo, with a grip that comes from the rock as much as from the grape. Locally the grape is called Spanna.

The Sizzano Nebbiolo vines were planted between 1960 and 2020, so the wine blends very old plants with young replacements. The Uva Rara comes from about 0.3 hectares planted in 1950 and 2014.

The siblings’ starting belief, in their own words, is that “there are no great wines without a great soil, and a soil cannot be great if it is not respected.” In practice that means sprays of copper and sulphur only, helped by algae, essential oils and plant macerations. Between the rows they green-manure and sow a mix of seven herbs that feed and structure the soil, so there is no need for synthetic fertiliser. The aisles are not tilled. The aim is a vineyard with as much life in it as possible.

In the cellar the rule is the least possible intervention. Fermentations run on the yeasts that come in on the grapes, with little pumping over and no temperature control in the maceration. The Sizzano then ages for about two years in large oak casks of 2,000 litres. Nothing is fined or filtered.

Then comes the part almost nobody bothers with. The wine is bottled by hand straight from the cask with a chèvre à deux becs, a tap with one inlet and two spouts, and corked so as to leave as little air as possible under the cork. Each cork is then sealed with natural beeswax, which cuts oxygen further and protects the wine as it ages. It is slow, old-fashioned work, and it makes a difference in the bottle.

There are no great wines without a great soil, and a soil cannot be great if it is not respected.

Fratelli Negri Viticoltori

The Sizzano is mostly Nebbiolo with Vespolina, the local grape that brings spice and black fruit to Nebbiolo’s cherry, cocoa and herbs. The siblings rank Sizzano among the greatest terroirs of Alto Piemonte, a place where serious wine has always been made from Nebbiolo with a touch of Vespolina. They make about 3,000 bottles, from yields of around 4.5 tonnes a hectare. On the nose it gives ripe cherry, sweet almond and kirsch, with flowers and the spice that Vespolina brings; in the mouth it is broad and fine, with velvety tannin. The importer’s sheet sums it up as “a wine of great purity, elegance and persistence.”

The Uva Rara is the rarer thing. The grape has almost disappeared from Alto Piemonte, where it was always a minor blending partner that softened Nebbiolo. The Negri bottle it on its own: hand-picked, fermented in wooden vat on wild yeasts, with a fifth of the grapes given a month of carbonic maceration, then nine months in wood. It comes out deep in colour, full of ripe cherry and blackberry, soft in tannin, with a faint prickle of carbon dioxide that gives it energy (decant it if you prefer it still). About 2,500 bottles are made.

Together the two wines cover what this corner of Piedmont can do: a serious, age-worthy Nebbiolo from old vines, and a red you can drink cool with salumi. There is very little of either, and Alto Piemonte is still little known in America.