How Timorasso Became Piedmont’s Ageworthy White
PART 1: Why Walter Massa, the ‘father of timorasso’, placed his bets on a virtually extinct white grape, and how that’s paid off
Walter Massa, all photos © Patricia Thomson
Walter Massa would be the first to admit that timorasso is a vexing troublemaker. “It’s a difficult grape that produces badly,” he says in Italian. “I’m not saying little, I’m saying badly, which is different.”
This coming from the mouth of the man who single-handedly rescued the grape from oblivion and spent a lifetime promoting it as Piedmont’s age-worthy white. Even so, he finds timorasso frustrating: “Some vines are balanced, some produce too much, some don’t produce.” Other growers curse its dense canopy—more hedge than vine. They lament how easily its ripe grapes detach, potentially leaving half your harvest on the ground.
So why stake his career on timorasso? And why give it a serious shot in the first place? He replies with passion: “Because I wanted to give a serious shot to my life!” […]
Published September 23, 2019 in Palate Press
Claudio Mariotto’s amphora-aged L’imbevibile — ‘undrinkable’ — which is anything but.
PART 2: Testing the Limits of Timorasso
While timorasso’s prevailing style emphasizes terroir and longevity, winemakers are pushing boundaries with everything from spumante to orange wine made with this white grape.
Claudio Mariotto smiles impishly as he pours a wine named L’Imbevibile—Undrinkable. It’s anything but. Fermented in amphora for 30 days on the skins, this intense, apricot and honey–inflected wine is one of the many experiments seen at the event called Quatar Pass per Timurass, roughly “Four Routes for Timorasso” in Piedmontese dialect.
Claudio Mariotti with one of his amphoras.
This event is essentially an annual, open-cellar day in June–held in the Colli Tortonesi DOC zone, organized by the Piedmont chapter of Slow Food —and also the best way to find out what timorasso winemakers are really up to. They pour not only their commercial releases—classic Derthona and various single-vineyard timorassos—but also their tests, wild experiments, and special bottles from private stashes. One can find orange timorasso, sparkling and frizzante timorasso, passito timorasso, blended timorasso, timorasso without sulfites, timorasso aged in acacia or chestnut barrels, timorasso with 10 years in bottle—every iteration imaginable.
This unfettered spirit of experimentation is more akin to craft brewing than to Italian winemaking where centuries of tradition are compiled into DOC and DOCG rulebooks as thick as yesteryear’s phone directories.
The fact that timorasso is new or rather, newly resurrected—gives winemakers liberty to act with similar abandon. Timorasso is effectively a blank slate, absent as a varietal wine since phylloxera nearly wiped it out in the late 1800s. And while the style pioneered by Walter Massa a century later has come to dominate and largely set the parameters for the Colli Tortonesi Timorasso DOC, there’s clearly a curiosity about what timorasso can do outside the DOC rulebook. […]
Published October 1, 2019, in Palate Press.
