Roero Arneis
La Val Dei Preti
Varietal: 100% Arneis
Production: 6.000 bottles
Soil: Area “La Val dei Preti” 65% fine sand, 4% course sand, 29% silt, 2% clay
Exposure and altitude: South / 270 m above sea level
Harvest: manual, beginning September
Training system: vertical trellised
Pruning: Guyot
Planting Density: 5500 plants/ha
Yield: 70 hl/ha
Vinification: 70% light pressing, fermentation in stainless steel at controlled temperature, protection from hoxygen; 30% maceration; fermentation in stainless steel vats
Aging: at least 4 months in stainless steel vats and 6 years in bottles
Serving temperature: 10-12°
Galloni-Vinous points:
Roero Arneis Val dei Preti 2015 – 90
Roero Arneis Val dei Preti 2016 – 92
Wine Advocate points:
Roero Arneis Val dei Preti 2015 – 92
THE UNIVERSE IN A GLASS OF WINE
the Crab Pulsar, a cosmic spinning top
ROERO ARNEIS “La Val dei Preti” 2012
Ciao! I introduce myself… I’m a very special wine and I come from the magical lands of “Roero”.
Have you ever seen the overwhelming complexity of my hills? Have you ever admired those petrified monuments of the power of nature that we call “Rocche”? Have you ever touched, smelled, crushed in your hands that mixture of sand, marl, gravel, sandstone and plaster that creates the soil in which my roots go to look for their nourishment?
If they call me “Arneis” there must be a reason, right? In the Piedmontese dialect, in fact, this name refers precisely to a whimsical, fickle person with unexpected reactions.
My vitality, my apparent grumpiness and my imagination are the result of that surprising and varied land that has looked after me with so much love.
You can imagine then the anger that rises up to the neck of the bottle when I hear voices saying “It should be drunk immediately, when it’s young, when its scents of fruit and flowers give their best”. Yes, drinking me gives
you joy and pleasure already when I’m young and yet I too have a lot of aspirations and a deep desire to live as long as possible.
Call it conservation instinct, if you may, but it is certainly something much more extensive and deeper than that. Let me prove it to you!
To do all this, I need to completely estrange myself from the earthly world and isolate for a few years, and the “screw cap” with which I’ve been closed simplifies this process. The reason why I exist is a combination of two
factors: a historic vineyard like “La Val dei Preti” and a revolutionary closing, such as the screw cap, thanks to which every bottle is perfect and with no risk of alterations due to external factors. My life is considerably
longer due to a lower oxygenation through the cap, sulfur dioxide much lower than the average… in short, I’m even a healthy and innovative wine.
How do I pass the time, hermetically closed for so long? Well…just remembering my oldest origins, looking at the Universe from whose elements the wine was born, being its essence itself, its prodigious juice. And since a poet once said: “The whole Universe is in a glass of wine” my instinct to stare at the sky has found its reasons. I can play with glass, choose the right angles, and take advantage of the light that filters through the windows of the cellar.
And then the miracle happens – at least that’s how you call it – that allows me to see closely, in all its details, some splendid example of the wonders of the Cosmos and of Nature. After all we’re brothers, so the millions of light
years of distance literally disappear. From those visions I draw even greater strength and vitality, to give the best of myself.
And since this show is so wonderful I thought I’d share it with you.
Every year I will give you a different gift: a photograph of our fascinating Universe, together with a brief explanation of a professional astronomer, Professor Vincenzo Zappalà, who gave voice to my thoughts.
This year I chose an object that resembles me a lot, for it also looks restless and bizarre: a pulsar, or what remains of a huge star that exploded to give the Universe all the necessary elements to form life, including me. This explosion was seen with the naked eye, in broad daylight, about a thousand years ago, and the Chinese still remember it in their astronomical annals. Today, the first impression it gives is that of a colored cloud in constant expansion, which has
been called the Crab nebula because of its shape.
Looking at its inside there is a gigantic spinning top appearing, a spinning
top capable of turning on itself thirty times a second.
Only special eyes can see it, but I, of course, I can … Each turn sends a flash as if it were a lighthouse that breaks through the fog and tells of enormous energy, of immense forces at work, all compressed in a heavy sphere of twenty miles in diameter, but with a mass greater than that of our Sun. And I inebriate myself with her beauty and try to transfer it in the scents enclosed in this bottle. Drink me, and drink a piece of the Universe.
And feel free to be surprised if, at every sip, with your eyes closed, the image of the cosmic spin will appear to you…