Luca is one of my top natural producers in Piemonte. I have been tasting his wines for two years now. They are in the very traditional camp, i.e. no new oak, no extraction and he does long maceration on the skins for between 30 and 90 days on his red wines.

Luca is a 5th generation grower and he and I share having lost one of our parents to what we believe is excessive chemical spraying. Both his mum and my dad died of lung cancer without ever having smoked. In my dad's case, it seems likely that it was a result of the chemicals he sprayed in large quantities on his vineyards whereas for Luca's mum it may have been due to the proximity of neighbouring conventional vineyards where they were spraying similar synthetic chemicals. Luca's family vineyards are organic and have been for over a century. His family have been making natural wine since 1880.

His vineyards

What fascinates me about Luca is his philosophy in the vineyard, which is very similar to that of Didier Barral and indeed Fukuoka, namely that forests are the perfect example of how to cultivate land, i.e. not to cultivate them at all! If you spend time observing a forest floor you will notice there is no imbalance, no erosion, no water retention and so on. It is the perfect equilibrium because forest floors have never been cultivated. There has been no intervention and nature has created its own balance.

Consequently Luca does not cultivate his soils. He simply cuts the grass underneath the vines in order to prevent too much humidity that could in turn facilitate the onset of fungal disease. He  uses copper sulfate (aka Bordeaux Mixture) to treat his vines (up to 1 kilo of copper per ha - well below the 6 kilos of copper per ha allowed by some organic certifying bodies). According to Luca, when you spray Bordeaux Mixture (the blue stuff you sometimes see on vine leaves) you should not be able to see any blue at all. If you can see blue, then it's because the producer has sprayed far too much. Luca explained to me that you should actually be able to touch the leaf and not really have any residues remain on your hand at all. In fact, he says he'd be happy to eat a leaf straight off the vine after spraying given how little he actually uses. The quantities involved should be minute.

In the cellar

Luca never uses yeasts that are not ambient to his vineyard. He does not fine or filter and the levels of total SO2 in his wines range from 25 to 50 mg/l for reds and whites.

His wines

He makes a fascinating, profound range of wines that are very long-lived. I asked him what Barolo / Barbaresco vintages he would be drinking now and he told me the 1970s.

His whites are very individual wines. 

Luca’s dad started experimenting with creating white wine with nebbiolo (a black grape) in the 1980s so they have kept this going. Apparently they have a white made with 100% nebbiolo which you can only taste if you go visit them in person.

His Langhe Rosso is worth looking out for as it comes from vines that are on Barolo / Barbaresco sites but are too young to be made into Barolo or Barbaresco.

Check out my individual tasting notes of his wines:

Langhe Bianco, 2009 - www.thatcrazyfrenchwoman.com/node/296

Solea, 2006 - www.thatcrazyfrenchwoman.com/node/297

Barbera d'Alba, 2003 - www.thatcrazyfrenchwoman.com/node/298

Pajé, Barbaresco, 2004 - www.thatcrazyfrenchwoman.com/node/299

Pajé Riserva, Barbaresco, 1998 - www.thatcrazyfrenchwoman.com/node/300

La Rocca e la Pira, Barolo, 2004 - www.thatcrazyfrenchwoman.com/node/301

Crichet Pajé, Barbaresco, 1999 - www.thatcrazyfrenchwoman.com/node/302

Langhe Rosso, 2003 - www.thatcrazyfrenchwoman.com/node/303

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