Le Piane Boca 2019

About a half hour southwest of Lake Maggiore’s southern tip, Le Piane’s vineyards are just outside the town of Boca, surrounded by dense woods among rolling hills, the fingertips of the Alps that dominate the northern skyline. The road up to Le Piane’s vineyard is a winding dirt track, and one would be forgiven for missing the ancient, windowless gray building that is the winery. This is Piedmont’s wildest, most remote quarter, but in some ways it’s the most remarkable. Le Piane’s story is one of the more dramatic stories in the world of wine. In the eighteenth century, Boca was a thriving region with more than 4,000 hectares of Nebbiolo, Vespolina, and Croatina planted. In the 19th and 20th centuries industry in Milan and Turin called and most people from Boca answered until in the 1980s there were fewer than 10 total hectares of vines. In 1988, Antonio Cerri was in his eighties and one of the region’s last winemakers, until Austrians Christoph Kunzli and Alexander Tolf visited and tasted his wines. They decided that day to purchase Le Piane and save this unique corner of the wine world from extinction. Today, Boca is known as the most ethereal version of Nebbiolo in all of Piedmont.