Nicoletta Bocca, San Fereolo: If Humanity Has a Future, So Will Wine

Amused, she showed me a photo of a white label with the stylised Nestarec signature. We already knew each other, but only properly met on this occasion. I was dying to ask this queen of Dolcetto from Dogliani (San Fereolo Instagram) a thousand questions. So here are a few.

Words by Milan Nestarec / Photos courtesy of Nicoletta Bocca, San Fereolo

* A quick note before you dive in: what follows isn't really an interview in the traditional back-and-forth sense. I sent questions, and what came back was Nicoletta responding in her own voice, on her own terms — often closer to an essay than a Q&A. It's dense, meandering in the best way, and often quietly profound.

It's a long read, full of juicy nuggets, hard-earned wisdoms, jabs and references — pop-cultural, philosophical, historical, political, economical… mirroring Nicoletta's wide-ranging knowledge and rich life story. The kind of piece you savour So we kept it as such – read it in one long sitting, or come back to it over several sessions, chronological or not – the subheadlines and quotes shall help your eyes land or something your soul needs to hear. Either way, treat it like a bottle of Nicoletta’s famous San Fereolo: something with layers, that rewards patience, and that gets better and more delicious the slower you go.

I'll start simply, how are you? When I saw you in April, you radiated peace, humility and relaxation. In fact, I understood your wines even more because I was able to get to know you as a person. You shine just the same. How would you describe your personality?

An introverted person—bored by superficial conversations yet still interested in substantive ones and at the same time loving symposium, dinners together and laughing; lacking the knack for cultivating relationships for the sake of utility, yet present—whenever possible—in others times of need; driven by a desire to understand, by curiosity, wonder, ethics, truth, honesty, justice, goodness, and a love for all living beings, be they plants or animals. Suspicious and trusting all at once; bold yet insecure. Generous, I hope.

I was really happy to meet you in Verona, at Bacchanal. You don't know this, but you were my superhero when I was just starting out. I often used your quote "When my wine feels comfortable, it gives you all its loyalty." because there is so much truth in it. Thank you for that. How and when do you feel comfortable, and could you show your loyalty, just like your wines?

I feel comfortable with people who have the time to listen, understand, and be receptive to inner qualities, the ones that last in time, and are not going to disappear after a little while—much like wine, which can be appreciated and understood hours or even days after the bottle is opened because it was born with a quest for longevity and depth.

If you leave the table or jump to another wine you will never be able to grab complexity and evolution. Evolution, process, metamorphosis in human soul and life, in nature, everywhere, much more interesting that the final result itself.

I feel at ease with people who care more about the truth than their own personal standing; who can recognize competence, make room for it, and learn from it; who possess the ability to laugh at themselves without cynically mocking others; people for whom ethics are indispensable, that can evaluate without being judgmental. You are loyal when you undertake a venture with others who truly care about the shared endeavor, like robbing a bank or working for an appellation rather than stopping at your own estate.

Yet, knowing and understanding people and their aspirations—and their capacity to resist certain appetites—is no simple matter; sometimes, the nuances are subtle, coming into focus only after months, even if they aroused your suspicion from the very start.

I am reminded of that scene in Blade Runner where the replicants are asked questions to determine whether or not they are human. The answer is always correct, but it is the almost imperceptible emotional details accompanying it that reveal the humanity and empathy of the person in front of us, and let us know whether they are telling the truth.

PHILOSOPHY

I'd like to ask you about the time "before wine." You studied philosophy — a discipline that, I believe, stays useful for life, whatever you end up doing. Why didn't you continue in that field?

I did not pursue philosophy, nor did I follow in my father’s footsteps, because I felt a need for concreteness—for facts that assert themselves over words, rather than words attempting to bend facts to fit a particular interpretation of the world. If you prune a vine poorly, you won’t get grapes, or you’ll ruin the plant; you can spin it with words all you like, but the fact remains—stubborn and unchangeable. “Facts are the most stubborn things in existence.” It is time to stop fooling ourselves with the sophistry of pure reasoning.

Do you still draw on it today? Is there an author who particularly influenced you?

The vineyard—nature itself—is the realm of ethics devoid of ideology. What you fail to do, someone else will be forced to do; what you do poorly leaves a mark, a cut, a wound that you will face every day.

From this perspective, the emblematic figure and the philosophical influence that has stayed with me is Plato, or rather, the Socrates found in Plato’s early dialogues. Here is a man possessed by a daimon—an inner force guiding him without compromise in his ceaseless quest. He wanders through Athens, challenging his interlocutors’ conviction that they know the truth—testing their deep understanding of fundamental concepts of shared life, such as justice, friendship, beauty, goodness, eros.

Through relentless open-ended questioning, he leads them inexorably from the confusion surrounding the outward appearance of an idea toward a concept that is truly internalized and understood in terms of its human implications.

It is Plato’s ability—through the dialogue form—to establish a three-way conversation: the written exchange between the characters present on the page before us, and the dialogue with the reader, who—almost without realizing it—becomes part of the encounter, growing and changing as if he, too, was conversing with Socrates and, at the same time, with himself.

Then there is the concept of knowledge as a spiral. One does not get directly at the truth of a thing—a sensation captured brilliantly in the dialogues—but rather through a spiral-like progression; one circles back to the same point but with heightened awareness and greater conceptual solidity, drawing ever closer to the truth’s inherent complexity. This truth is never monolithic—one should be wary of anyone who presents truth as such—but rather complex, living, and metamorphic, emerging from the convergence of all possible viewpoints shaped by the history and experience of the observer and people around him. Depth of field is not perceived by a single eye but by two or, in this instance, by many eyes.

Paul Friedländer’s essay on Plato also greatly helped me understand the context of his reasoning: the era of Sophistry—an age of deceptive logic pursued for its own sake, where words were merely logical tokens to be played with—which had to be countered by returning to the profound essence of the ideas those words represented.

Today, we find ourselves once again in an age of Sophistry: an era of democracy reduced to mere appearance and a lack of competence, of dialogue as deceptive persuasion, and of personal profit—achieved through the manipulation of others—as the sole value.

FASHION

Your mother was a journalist who wrote about fashion and she led you into this world. You went on to work for Armani, Versace, and Ferré. How do you look back on this period? What was the atmosphere like in the industry at that time?

It was a difficult time. I needed to pay for medical treatment and didn’t have a job, so I took a position in a fashion designer’s press office. I knew how to write a bit and I was raised by two journalists (even though my birth mother was a ballet dancer). From there, I began looking for a path within fashion that actually interested me. An opportunity arose to edit a book for Electa on the history of Italian fashion; Enrica Morini and I were commissioned to write the chapter on prêt-à-porter and Italian fashion design. It was my first research project, and Enrica taught me the method.

Researching the documents was thrilling: tracking down people who had shaped the history of Italian prêt-à-porter only to vanish from the radar within a decade, gave me the feeling of an archaeologist and an explorer. We were recovering lost pieces while simultaneously discovering how quickly one can be erased and forgotten by the all-consuming obsession of superficiality. It was a memento mori and, at the same time, a way of putting things back in their place—restoring historical truth. It is ironic to think that I decided to dedicate myself to vineyards and wine because it was the antithesis of the mechanisms I saw in fashion at the time.

Wine represented stability, longevity, lasting in time, substance, and patience. Now, what were once values, have become liabilities seen as old-fashioned, while "oenological zapping" wins the day: collaborations, and winemakers who produce 1,000 bottles in the Veneto one year and another 1,000 on Mount Etna the next—all while we are forced to listen to them talk about understanding *terroir*. I left fashion because I was Socratic, and now I want to escape the world of wine, too. The only thing that holds firm is the discipline and tangible reality of agriculture.

Maybe I'm imagining it all wrong, but can you find certain analogies between fashion and wine? It must have been fascinating to see designers who often think outside the box. What influenced you the most?

At one point, I found myself teaching at a postgraduate design school—Domus Academy—which hosted an industrial design course led by Alessandro Mendini and a fashion design course directed by Gianfranco Ferré, who had originally trained as an architect.

When our designers were first training, there were no fashion schools in Italy; at Domus, I sought to analyze how their diverse educational backgrounds led individual designers to think about and approach garment construction in different ways.

Perhaps this is what has stayed with me the most: the link between biography, apprenticeship years, and the creative process—the way information is reprocessed after hours spent repeating seemingly pointless gestures that eventually metamorphose into a new idea. It is also about the importance of chance and the unexpected, and how we manage to resolve them.

Then there is the collaboration among raw material producers, that extraordinary Italian artisanal network of fabric makers and others. Loro Piana, Zegna, Menta, Taroni, Agnona, to name just a few, without whom the journey would not have been the same.

Very often, the idea of the designer collection was born thanks to suggestions given by fabric makers, a field where creativity is more strongly linked to technical and artisanal competence and skill.

In the creative process, there is a unique, untransferable balance—virtue and qualities cannot be transmitted or inherited, as the Platonic Socrates discovers with Alcibiades—among elements such as training, biography, intuition, taste, and social aspirations. Through an individual, these elements can give life to an object—be it a garment, a wine, a recipe, or a building—that remains inextricably linked to the mastery of those who created the raw materials, be it a piece of cloth, grapes, raw food or new construction materials.

Another interesting point to explore would be the shared ability of fashion and wine to work with the imagination—using imagery as a gateway to the soul.

ART, FASHION AND WINE

I'll continue with the artistic theme. I often think that wine can be a kind of art in its own way, but I still don't have a clear answer to that myself. How do you see it — should the grower project his/her thoughts into the wine, influencing it with their ego? Or is nature actually the artist?

To be honest, I am not entirely sure what art is, because before becoming invention, avant-garde, or the so-called ‘individual expression of genius’, art was for a long time a craft. I find no art interesting without that element of craftsmanship, and I prefer to think of wine—or at least certain wines—as the product of sensitive craftsmanship.

There is a humility in knowing that the foundation of our work is giving a service to others, to customers, knowing that my goal is to ensure the person drinking the wine feels good, rather than merely feeding my own ego or seeking to expand knowledge and ideas.

The key, perhaps, lies in finding a balance between the two: the artisan lacking invention or intuition remains stuck in mere replication, while the artist disconnected from the material world fades into self-referentiality, loose contact with their so-called ‘customers’. Creativity feeds on craftsmanship, and in turn, it nourishes and fosters the artisan’s technical skills.

It seems to me that these words by Céline aptly express the concept of artistic work as the labor of an artisan or craftsman—but also the idea that, ultimately, everything has already been created. We invent nothing; we simply take the truth and strip away whatever obscured it from our view and our writing and our winemaking. It is not invention, it is vision.

“I have no trouble conceiving a novel, and I always ‘obey’ the same process... I don’t construct a plan. It seems to me that everything already exists in the air. So, I have twenty castles in the air that I’ll never have the time to visit. But they are complete; everything is there—they belong to me. All this talk of plans seems like nonsense to me. Everything is already written outside of man, in the air—which shields it the moment I try to touch it, that is, to put it on paper, to write it down, describe it; the transmutation of the mirage into paper is painful, slow—it is alchemy. But everything is there. Truth be told, I create nothing; I clean a sort of hidden medallion, a statue buried in clay. Everything already exists; that is my impression. When everything is thoroughly cleaned, polished, and clear—then the book is finished. The cleaning is done. It is a matter of sculpting; one simply has to clean, to clear away the surroundings—to reveal it in the harsh light—to have the strength; it is a question of strength—forcing the dream into reality—a domestic task. Nothing but nonsense comes from within oneself, from one’s own plans. Everything happens outside of us—in the waves, I think. There is no vanity in this—it is truly the work of a laborer—a laborer in the waves.”

Wine is inextricably linked to the presence of the other—the drinker.

Historically, the wine place is that of a mediator of conversation, a catalyst for the fluid exchange between people. This is its role in the Greek symposium and the Georgian supra [a traditional Georgian feast centered on ritual, philosophical toasting led by a tamada, or toastmaster, editor’s note]; yet, because this is a hard, exhausting, and uncertain job, today’s winegrower—who pursues it by choice rather than necessity—needs gratification and recognition. That is fine, provided we do not lose sight of the fact that we are not the purpose, but the means.

That said, anyone who takes the work seriously inevitably infuses it with their own personality—making choices in the vineyard and cellar that reflect their history, character, and ethics. Yet, there is the other half of the equation: the people who must want to drink the bottles we produce because we put them at ease, make them happy, or provoke thought.

It is the artisan’s pride—like the one that pushed Hephaestus, the blacksmith God of fire removed from Olympus, to forge Achilles’ shield—to bring something into the world that is beautiful, useful, and meant to be shared; something that expresses both an understanding of the raw material and the ability to guide it through one’s craft and technique, skills born from experience rather than abstract intent.

Due to this awareness and artisanal pride, I have no interest in wines that claim to have "created themselves naturally and with no intervention." We, too, are elements of the terroir; we are a variable that makes a wine—whether made by me or by you—distinct, even when starting from the same grapes harvested in the same place.

It must be said, however, that life is a journey; everyone has the right to go through an ego-driven, self-referential phase where they believe themselves the sole guardians of "natural wine” or of wine, period.

A producer here in Piedmont once told me, "If you’re good, it takes ten years to understand the place and the grapes in your hands; if you’re very, very good, five might suffice."

Yet, in an era where everything moves fast and novelty triumphs over lasting in time, that kind of time is no longer available—neither to winemakers nor to drinkers.

This is the age of the "aperitif wine," not the osteria wine—the kind of wine that would keep company until dawn with those staying late to play cards, a wine you had all night to get to know and come to love. And Dolcetto is that kind of wine.

I did go through that self-absorbed phase, though; I did some incredibly stupid things—showing total disregard for the person actually drinking the wine—and even sent wine off to the vinegar plant instead of selling it in a lucky moment of consciousness. I probably still have one foot in that mindset of prioritizing exploration and stubbornly rowing against the current, but that sort of thing doesn't interest me anymore in a total way.

I know what I needed to know about the terroir and the grapes, and I’ve had my say; now I want to think about others, too. One has to be free to be an adolescent, but also free to mature—to grow old, become outdated, boring, a senex—incomprehensible to the young, just as they are incomprehensible to us, an old Saturn character always complaining. [E. N.: Senex, Latin for "old man", is the Jungian archetype of age and rigidity, traditionally linked to Saturn and set in opposition to the youthful puer.]

My son, looking at it from the outside, says: "This isn't a wine estate; it’s you. There is no place for others. San Fereolo is you. You’ve never cared about making it a place where people work together, or about what the people out there think and desire, what they want to know, or letting them know what we’re doing."

He’s right, and commercially speaking, we’re paying the price for it. We aren't writers or painters; owning land and employing people to work the fields costs far more than a sheet of paper and a typewriter.

PIEDMONT, THE LANGHE

Piemonte is a region connected to your father, the famous journalist Giorgio Bocca, who was active in the WW2 Resistance in the local hills. Over time, he made friends there, from whom he bought wine and with whom he enjoyed drinking it — Bartolo Mascarello, Rinaldi, and others. How do you remember this period? Are there any relationships that still last today?

I started coming to this area, le Langhe, with my father when I was just a child. He would visit a couple of times a year to buy wine and truffles; he was a man who loved good food, and he had fought in the Resistance against the Nazis right here in the Langhe.

It was a place that held special meaning for him as did the producers who had hidden and helped him and his men of Divisione Giustizia e Libertà. To me, it was a magical place, a place where, behind the door of a modest home, the ritual of hospitality would unfold, accompanied by wines that were true revelations.

You might think there was nothing interesting there, perhaps an unmarried brother and sister in their sixties, the "good" glassware brought out for the occasion, and then BAM! came the epiphany: an extraordinary wine, an experience that left you humbled and reverent, making you realize you hadn't understood a thing about the world and that the marvelous often hides where you least expect it.

When I returned here, at twenty-eight, some of my father’s friends were still around; my wedding was officiated by Franca—Bartolo Mascarello’s wife—who at the time was a council member in the municipality of Barolo.

What played a fundamental role in these relationships wasn't the technical instruction from individual producers, but rather the attitude, the way they viewed time and longevity in wine, the tradition as a way to preserve identity over the last fashion wave discovered by the young to build their own identity. And they shaped my belief that making wines based on these principles would allow me to build a bridge to that world and keep it alive.

When I arrived, the era of the "Modernists" had just started, a time defined by short macerations, barriques, "makeup", and accelerated timelines. I’m sorry, but there are no shortcuts in this kind of work; the wines dictate the pace, as does the work in the vineyards.

The pruner tried to be clever to save half an hour, and now the person tying branches takes half an hour longer. What is gained upfront is lost later, and the illusion that one can avoid paying the price in terms of time and patience is one of the illnesses of modern times. Like my father used to say: "Better intelligent than clever.”

What were your beginnings like? When I think back to mine, they were terrible, but beautiful at the same time. That sweet naivety has an intoxicating scent. How was it for you — a gradual falling in love with wine? Did you take up wine as a means of self-expression, or rather as a craft that is perhaps hidden in your DNA?

I started by leaving Milan for a half-abandoned house, driven by the bond with the Langhe region forged in childhood through wine; I found myself working in the vineyard. What truly mattered to me was the vineyard—the only place capable of dictating the rhythm of my days: the cycle of day and night, heat and cold, rain and sun—forces beyond one’s command to which one must adapt.

It was the only place that was not trackable by words or self-indulgence, that prioritized the necessity of work over the luxury of indulging in one’s own pain. It was a discipline, a penal colony of great beauty where I served time for what I felt were my own mistakes.

The vineyard was central, a place of respect for the wisdom and the toil of the vine itself. It has always been that way, and it remains so.

Even in these incredibly difficult times, I might forgo the harvest, but I cannot let the vineyard die. I have always made wine out of gratitude to the vineyard: to prove to my father that I would keep his world alive, to save the wisdom of old vines from abandonment or uprooting, and to understand a place through the struggle of the plant.

Never for the sake of the wine itself. I drank wine to grasp the essence of places and the character of people—to understand the hopes and dreams they sought to turn into reality. Now, wine interests me little, and this profession even less. The social fabric of the farming community is unraveling; entrepreneurs, investors, and the wealthy are arriving, razing old farmhouses to build villas with swimming pools.

If I were thirty, I might still be willing to find beauty and hope and possibility, but I'm tired — I can't face the new world that young people are trying to build. I feel like I'm part of a world that's disappearing. But then the will to struggle, to belong to this new world, and to understand it comes back again.

DOLCETTO AND DOGLIANI

Dolcetto. Dolcetto from Dogliani. A great thing that you fight tirelessly for. Please tell me about this variety.

Dolcetto is a destiny. I ended up in these hills looking for a house and I found Dolcetto—a wine that immediately became a dialogue partner I had to reckon with. There was Mr. Stralla’s old vineyard, grafted onto Rupestris du Lot rootstock [Vitis rupestris rootstock developed in the Lot region of France in the 1880s, prized for its strong resistance to phylloxera and still widely used today, editor’s note], producing a wine rich in substance, polyphenols, and anthocyanins.

Old vineyards around were exceptional, yet the common way to interpret Dolcetto was only one: as a wine to be drunk young. Such a one-dimensional interpretation wouldn't do, especially given the magnificent raw material I saw here. I was turning away from trends and embracing my own reserved nature, one rooted in wine’s longevity, rather than immediate appeal, so I needed to find a new way to interpret the wine, one that would reveal its more complex character.

Slowly, San Fereolo as wine was born; I extended maceration times, opted for fermentation in big wooden vats, and adopted the submerged-cap technique.

The idea was to stop fearing the tannins everyone else tried to avoid, to ride through them, much like navigating ocean waves, and then to give the wine time to let those tannins settle.

Dolcetto has been reduced to the role of a "geisha" for Piedmontese starters, yet it is a complex wine; it often misleads people into focusing solely on primary fruit flavors while sacrificing everything else. It is a challenging grape to cultivate: it starts with large basal leaves that turn the vine into a "bush," making shoot selection—or scarsulé, as we call it—laborious.

It is extremely sensitive to temperature fluctuations in air and soil, prone to rachis desiccation [drying and browning of the grape bunch's stem, which disrupts water and sugar flow to the berries and can cause uneven ripening or shriveling — often triggered by heat or water stress, E. N.].

Yet it is a wine that truly expresses its terroir; here in Dogliani, it has found an ideal habitat thanks to the altitude and the cool breezes from the surrounding mountains. It is a difficult wine in the cellar, where fruit and tannins often clash—a wine for which I wanted to explore broader possibilities regarding longevity and extraction. Perhaps, looking at the direction things are taking today, I chose the wrong path.

Do you know of an area anywhere in the world where Dolcetto thrives in a way at least somewhat similar to Dogliani? Have you tasted good Dolcetto from, say, the other side of the globe?

I have tasted a few Dolcettos from other regions, Australia, or the US, and they are radically different from ours—unrecognizable—perhaps precisely because of the incredibly strong bond this grape variety has with the soil and microclimate.

I say I’m tired, yet back in 2016, I began buying land and planting vines in Rocca Cigliè—a village of 164 inhabitants at an altitude of 600 meters. In the late 19th century, this area produced exceptional wines based on the "Murazzano formation": a soil composition of grey sands, thinly laminated marls, calcium carbonates, and iron-rich nodules embedded in sandstone. While everyone else heads toward Barolo, I am moving in the opposite direction—toward the "abandoned" Langhe of the Monregalese area.

* Learn even more about the Dolcetto grape variety and vineyard work – both texts by Nicoletta. Or listen to an episode of "I'll drink to that!" podcast episode with Nicoletta:

THE TERROIR "NEBBIOLIZZAZIONE"

Can you explain what happened historically that caused such a decline in Dolcetto plantings? Everyone is now planting Nebbiolo and pulling out vineyards of other autochthonous varieties. Was it the fame and economic success of Barolo and Barbaresco that affected the whole region? Or why is this happening?

Nebbiolizzazione, or nebbiolo-ization is a fact — an eleven-million-bottle fact, a recent fact, as it's only a little more than ten years old — and there are many reasons for it.

First, there's the price of land in the nearby Barolo area.

So producers from Barolo started looking at their surroundings, like Dogliani — a truly wonderful terroir — for new plantings. With the same amount of money, you can buy 30 hectares already planted, or more, here in Dogliani.

Meanwhile, in the Dogliani area, many winegrowers are abandoning their land because they cannot turn a profit from their work; labor and material costs are on the same level as in Barolo, yet their financial resources and revenues there are vastly higher. Can you really survive when there are labour cooperatives charging 9,000 euros per hectare—plus the cost of a tractor driver and pesticides—when a Dolcetto vineyard yields a maximum of 80 quintals per hectare at 1.10 euros per kilo, bringing in total revenue of just 8,800 euros?

In the span of about a decade, Nebbiolo has gone from being a virtually unknown wine to a status symbol, together with the growing fame of Barolo and Barbaresco. It is the same grape used for the two appellations, yet the bottles can be purchased at lower prices and they are lighter wines more suitable to the new lifestyle.

Then there are the psychological and marketing factors, the way influential voices in the industry talk about Dolcetto. “Dolcetto is the wine of our grandparents, the wine our poor elders drank at their dinner table; yes, we respect it but we are not making a living on it, yes we respect it but Barolo and Nebbiolo are cooler and show you are a connoisseur, yes we love good old Dolcetto but do you really want to be so old-fashioned and drink ‘il vino del nonno’ [wine of your grandpa]?”

It is a wine of substance that requires time, whereas Nebbiolo is a wine of aromatics and subtlety, better suited to the lighter, plant-forward cuisine of today. As Farinetti puts it: "Nebbiolo is a timeless, metallic-pale blue Bentley; Dolcetto is a Fiat Ritmo from the 80s."

This sentence makes me laugh every time I think of it.

RIESLING AND GEWURZTRAMINER

One thing that I admire about you is your range. You know that Dolcetto best reflects your terroir, and yet you also plant Riesling and Gewürztraminer on one north-facing slope. Were you the first to do something like that in the region?

I planted Riesling and Traminer on the north side of my hill, on the slope where Mr. Stralla used to ski as a child with two wooden planks tied at his feet. I did it because I hated the boring Chardonnays in barriques produced by the new wave of Barolo Boys.

I love traditional Langhe red varieties but, after some years, first, you get bored and, second, you also want to understand wines you loved, and for me, that region – for white wines – was Alsace.

Alsace fascinated me because of its history, villages, complexity of terroir, Martin Schongauer engravings and the Grunewald Isenheim masterpiece. It was also where we went for ‘viaggio di nozze‘, our honeymoon with my husband.

And then I tried to understand what these two grapes could really become in our area, rather than imitating wines from other regions just to satisfy critics who feel safer with the familiar and are wary of diversity. It's a way of saying: "Look at the truth of this variety here in the Langhe — this is the grape, but the wine can be different, and I embrace that, because it's the expression of my place."

BIODINAMICA

I’m curious about your approach to biodynamics, especially because I personally went through a phase when I felt like BD had lost its appeal, that it had become just a marketing ploy for some growers. Or that some growers used these practices like a cookbook – every year the same “recipe”, repeated without much thought. I find this irritating – my way is the opposite of that, very individualised to each vintage, variety, place, vineyard, even plant. But maybe I’m unfair or missing something – please help me with your take here.

I came to biodynamics through a long journey, in which agriculture was only the final step.

Between the ages of six and ten—back in the 1960s—I attended a Steiner school in Milan. When the time came for my son to start kindergarten, after several disappointing attempts with local schools in Dogliani, I decided to go to Milan to see what had become of my old school.

The address had changed; upon arriving at Via Clericetti, I found myself in a classroom where a teacher-training lesson was underway. It was 2003.

I wanted to see if there really was such a vast difference—forty years later—between public schools and Waldorf schools. And there certainly was!

I ended up taking a two-year course to become a Waldorf school teacher, covering Goetheanism and anthroposophic medicine, alongside studies in The Philosophy of Freedom, anthroposophy, pedagogy, agriculture, painting, sculpture, and eurythmy. Meanwhile, I began taking my son to the pre-school in Milan; it was natural for each child to have an anthroposophic doctor. Pietro’s doctor—Sergio Francardo, an author of books on GMOs—introduced me to Claudio Elli, a veterinarian who performed nothing short of miracles on the dog I owned at the time.

In spring 2004, I took the only course available in Italy back then, held at La Zelata; and after the grape harvest, I prepared my first batch of "500" with Stefano Bellotti of Cascina degli Ulivi.

I share this long story to tell you that biodynamics is grounded in serious research hypotheses, complex reasoning, experimental attitude and scientific experience strongly related to other parts of anthroposophical ideas. To understand biodynamics, one has to know at least a little bit about what is behind it. People working with Steiner had very strong scientific background, they were not just dreamers with magical thinking.

This approach opens up an interpretation of the visible through the invisible—something that is, at least from a philosophical standpoint, monumental.

Unfortunately, there are always people who set about trivializing the whole thing and, quite possibly, driving it to ruin.

I totally agree with you. Biodynamic has become fashionable, cool and unrelated to the ideas that were at its origin. And some biodynamic consultants feel flattered to be hired by great estates that boost their CV, and simplify concepts that could be disturbing. It has become a rich people sport. And ‘making’ biodynamics is certainly easier for Roederer than for me.

Applying the same rules all around the world does not give an impression of connection with terroir. And above all, as Claudio Elli, the afore-mentioned vet, says, if you don’t understand the ratio behind the biodynamic preparation, you are going to fail because we are in a metamorphic world and preparations can change or be adapted.

Anyway, if you don't turn biodynamics into an irritating, egotistical artistic delirium, or into an elegant marketing solution full of cow horns and (unpaid) laborers poetically spraying 180 hectares by hand with 501, but instead stay grounded in reason with a metamorphic approach, it's still something very interesting to explore.

Ernst Marti's essay on etheric forces, the ratio behind Weleda medical preparations, and some of the ways of reading the different levels of reality of the world are still very valuable as a mind opener.

But don’t transform it into a religion, it was never meant as such. It is a scientific-goetheanistic approach.

Biodynamics is a very long and complicated story to write everything down but I’m sure we will find the time to talk about it together!

(TO) CRU (OR NOT TO CRU)

Your most famous wine, San Fereolo, doesn't come from a single vineyard, nor the same place every year — it's simply selected from the best wines each year. So I'm interested in your opinion on the idea of crus. Is putting wines from one small piece of land on a pedestal more of a political and economic choice than a wine one? Everything probably has its roots in history — in how influential or wealthy the people who owned the land were. I'm thinking of Bordeaux, for instance. Could you share your view on the matter?

Yes, you are right. The idea of cru related to the idea of bigger or lesser value is political and economic.

Some historical crus are losing their appeal due to climate change. South exposure is becoming less qualitative in many areas and yet the classification is still there. The money god wins.

But the idea of cru as a specific area with certain characteristics that are reflected in wine or in the reliability of harvesting a certain amount of grapes in a particular vineyard, that is very real.

I believe in mapping all the terroirs, naming them according to the homogeneity of that plot of land, and then giving producers the freedom to make a wine that mirrors that character, but without previous judgement on its quality. No first, grand and super cru and so on.

Taste is personal and some people will like one place better than another one. No use telling them which one is the best. And people who don’t care about their wine believing that the name of the cru will make the wine good and expensive are to be banished from the wine world, anyway.

Alsace, maybe, has a less commercial idea of crus – an idea based more on reliability of good harvest with healthy grapes in an age, the middle age, a distant age of little oenological instruments where the health and quality of grapes meant that the wine would be capable of looking after itself and lasting in cellars.

I think that from the agricultural / economical point of view, differences in places exist and can mean double the effort and work to obtain the same quantity and quality of grapes. There are places that I love, like Austri in Dogliani, where we have problems with ‘gelate’ [spring frosts] almost every year and if I was a vine grower that has to sell grapes, that place would probably not go into a first cru. It is actually classified as “vigneto di 4e classe” [E.N: the lowest tier of a historical Italian land-registry classification ranking vineyard plots by agricultural productivity, from 1st class — most fertile/reliable — to 4th class — least; not a measure of wine quality].

I thought my love and care could transform it into the first class, but unfortunately, it didn’t happen. On the other hand, the grapes there will never rot; it’s a good place for making quality wine, but with double the effort…

THE COMMUNITY IN DOGLIANI

You are the president of the local DOCG association. How important is the community to you? Please tell me more about the other growers, the people who shape this area.

Producers in Dogliani have lost their energies having seen their main grape and identity falling to ground zero in the last fifteen years. The community is extremely important but everybody is trying to survive now, concentrating their efforts on their own estate, and I can understand them.

It doesn't make much sense to try to work together when you know you’re living in a moment where every move you make can worsen things. We have to wait, let this disaffection get to the bottom, hold on and start again, in this era of “ Barolo takes it all”.

In the meantime, the most influential estates turned their sights on Barolo and Alta Langa, completely abandoning any effort to defend our grape and the terroir identity, despite the fact that they could do it, given their money and influence. They believe that the brand of single estate can do more for the appellation than the cooperation of producers that still has to be built.

Since the economy in the Dolcetto area is in a survival mode, we do not have many young producers – young guys are not interested in taking on a job that doesn’t make them rich or famous, as it would just ten kilometers from here.

I can mention Bricco Bracchi that mixes nostalgia of bold wines with new techniques as amfora. Marco [Battaglino] is an ‘oste’ in Osteria Battaglino and his idea of wine matches perfectly his idea of food. Or Tommaso Cappa with his very light Dolcetto, a contemporary style – the opposite of mine – and superb label designs. He represents all the young and smart producers we don’t have. Theirs are beautiful projects, but not a model for the area’s economy, unfortunately.

THE FUTURE OF WINE

I could go on and on, there are so many questions I would like to ask you. But let’s end with a simple yet very difficult question: "What is the future of wine"?

The problem is not "What is the future of wine?" but "What is the future of humanity?"

If humanity has a future, wine will too.

We — humans and wine — are bound together, and both our futures seem to be in danger at the moment. We need to restore the sense of time spent together, not in front of Netflix or TikTok, the modern heroin of our time. Wine is true sociality, conversation, exchange, shared time — it can bring true light again in this neon moment.

P. S. IL PROVINCIALE

I also asked Nicoletta about her father, the late journalist and WW2 partigiano Giorgio Bocca whose work called "Il provinciale: Settant'anni di vita italiana" (Mondadori, 1991) – an autobiography, tracing seventy years of Italian history from the wartime Resistance through the 1968 protests and beyond through his own life and the figure of "the provincial man" – inspired Nicoletta to make a wine of the same name. “To understand [her] father,” Nicoletta pointed me to a review of the book by journalist and author Michele Serra – so here’s Nicoletta’s English translation of the original Italian piece.

"The Provincial" by Giorgio Bocca. A Brusque Partisan Sent Out into the World

Michele Serra for Feltrinelli Editore, April 2007

When Il provinciale was published in 1991, I was too young to grasp it. Bocca is not an ideological journalist; he is a “biological” one. He reads people and events through the drives of the body and the psyche—hunger, ambition, envy, eros, the pleasure of money, the pain of scarcity. I devoured the first chapter—the one about the partisan war—but then put the book aside: the narrative thread, so relentlessly devoid of political partisanship, did not satisfy my then-insatiable need for an ideological view of the world. I thought Bocca was talented. But cynical.

Picking Il provinciale up again today, I was struck with a jolt of realization. Perhaps because I have lived, read, and written enough to understand that Bocca’s anti-idealism—that writing of his, at times ruthless and even abrasive—holds more than just the bitter tang of disillusionment (a valuable ingredient, to be sure, if one wants an honest reckoning).

It holds—and this is far more significant—the ability to examine the human story and the relationships between individuals and social classes by seeking out their substance, their core, their deep driving force: the "structure," as the Marxists say (or used to say), while taking care not to be overly distracted by the "superstructure." And so, I discovered that what had seemed almost "apolitical" to me twenty years ago was actually one of the finest political books ever written about Italy in the last sixty years. Not to mention—if I may say so—one of the best books, period, about this country and its people.

Il provinciale is a journalist’s autobiography. Not an essay, then, but rather a social novel—albeit one firmly anchored in the author’s own experience: his professional and romantic turning points, his travels, and his moods (it is impossible to encounter Bocca—whether in print or in person—without reckoning with his ill-humor; the list of those who "break his balls" is endless, and he writes as much as he says it). It also charts the gradual transformation of his own social circumstances and the various environments he inhabited: the Cuneo of his childhood and the Fascist era; the Alps and the Langhe during the partisan war; the Turin of the postwar reconstruction; and the Milan of the economic boom, followed by the upheavals of 1968, the years of terrorism, and the progressive unraveling of every fragile integrity from the past and every seemingly hard-won certainty.

Then there are the countless encounters—a privilege enjoyed by great journalists: Valletta, Montale, Enrico Mattei, Paul VI, Togliatti, Fallaci, Buzzati, Cederna, Italo Pietra, Capanna, Agnelli, Pirelli. Politicians and journalists, popes and heads of state—all are portrayed (much like the lowliest figure in a crime report) through a physical trait, a facial expression, or a character quirk, within that endless, visceral clash between human / animals that serves as the narrative thread of Il provinciale.

The winning and compelling element of the story—what renders it profoundly "moral" and lends it a literary depth rarely found in books by journalists—is Bocca’s ability to immerse himself, and his own personal and professional history, in the vast, vital chaos of Italy. His ego acts as a guinea pig for history, an involved participant rather than a detached observer or, worse, a moralist standing on the sidelines.

This is a far cry from the cold, haughty image of the journalist as a neutral schoolmaster—a dispenser of sage advice. Bocca draws freely not only on his successes and winning insights but also on his errors of judgment, his weaknesses, and even his (many) personal quirks; he portrays himself as fully immersed in the social and political tangle of the energetic, ambitious Italy that emerged from the war. He smiles at his brief stint in high-society salons, his fleeting affairs as a foreign correspondent, his attempts to understand—and sometimes to adapt—while fighting to make his mark and defeat personal enemies.

He speaks of his relationship with prosperity and money, with women and food (his account of his voracious yet joyful dealings with one of Milan’s finest delis is unforgettable), never delegating the description to the convenient alibi of "others." As you read, you see him: you see him struggling intellectually when the youthful upheaval of 1968 shakes and clashes with his rigorous, Piedmontese view of rights and duties; you see him in Vietnam, getting duped by a local driver who promises to take him to the Vietcong but instead goes to visit a cousin; you sense his anger and resentment when someone throws a wrench in the works of his career—a career to which, like a true provincial, he is as attached as he is to his own self.

Yes, this "biological" reading of Italian life possesses, in Il provinciale, a supreme virtue: the author never sets himself apart. He never seeks the (easy) applause reserved for the virtuous figure who has remained untainted. Even his well-known anti-fascism—which to this day embroils him in fierce, uncompromising controversies—is explained here, with an intellectual honesty hard to match, as a passionate, stirring defense of youth and its foundational myths, and of the spontaneous, innocent, and indomitable integrity of those who meet life head-on, embracing and fully possessing it.

In remarkable pages—made all the more poignant for me because I know those very mountains—Bocca recounts the partisan war in the Cuneo area primarily as an initiatory immersion into Mother Nature: the long treks through the snow, a dazzling bloom of high-altitude buttercups, the cold and the sky, the body transcending fatigue through a kind of ecstatic, elemental fervor. And death—which Bocca shoulders like a terrible rucksack, an inescapable part of both war and life—is rendered through his description of personally executing a German soldier: a mix of reticence and pity, the harshness of duty, and an unyielding memory. Never opting out.

From this, one grasps that Bocca’s uncompromising stance regarding the current re-examination of history, his swift dismissal of revisionism is not merely political. It is existential and foundational; it is the defense of a natural impulse to fight for what is right, and the good fortune of having done so within the maternal embrace of his home mountains, in that *Heimat* traversed first on children’s wooden skis and later with the rifle that struck down the oppressor, amidst snow and fire. What could the dogged, self-serving recalculation of death tolls and wrongs possibly matter to a man like that?

A pee in the snow "gazing at the yellowish hole in the immaculate white” brings the book to a close, linking the thread of life back to his earliest experiences, as one does in old age. A mountaineer pissing in the snow. Period.

Bocca would be furious, no doubt, to hear me but it is an ending that draws genuine tears, a clean, essential, "Piedmontese" kind of emotion. It clears away all other light and shadow from the burden of memory and restores to the body, the weary body of one who has truly lived, its status as the only real temple of memory, experience, and, ultimately, life. My father was born in 1920, just like Bocca; he lived through the war just as he did, though in a prisoner-of-war camp in Africa, without even the solace of finding any sense or familiarity in what was happening to him.

Reading lI provinciale, I realized how little we children understood of the gruffness and reticence of these wartime fathers, men who were unsentimental and stern, and who seemed alien to the fortunate, carefree antics of us children of the economic boom. Yet they were capable of rebuilding for us, and perhaps above all for us, a prosperous, peaceful life, and at least a semblance of democracy and civil society. They set out in a Fiat Topolino and made it all the way here. And, in the end, they were so undemanding, and perhaps witty enough to sum it all up in a solitary piss in the snow. "What is left to understand?" is the book’s final line. Read it, if you want to understand why.

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