In July 2022 my wife Emily and I visited the roly-poly hills of Barolo, Langhe. A romantic detour in our European summer trip that was probably a bit focussed on me actually, so I kept it to two days (ie. not enough). Skilfully however I had organised accomodation with a pool, but if I am being totally honest it was the only place available.

The hired FIAT 500 hybrid whinged up the hill from the Autostrada to the village of La Morra and like opening a book the vista unfolded in front of our little windscreen. It was breathtaking and difficult to judge scale - it looked more like photography than reality. The July sun was intense. A milky gauze of moisture in the air seemed to placate it somewhat though, creating a distinctively continental sensation. It struck me that it is a really good place to be part of the plant kingdom. Classically patch-worked vineyards coated every slope like wide brush strokes in chromium green, only occasionally punctuated by darker copses of cherries, hazelnuts and mixed woods. It smelt of the clayey earth and dried leaves. We hummed off down the winding road to the next village, Barolo (though I am not convinced the FIAT once engaged its electric motor the whole trip).

Upon arrival at our accomodation we found a very charming view of the village of Barolo to the right, the pool in the middle (💅), and the crenelated skyline of Castiglione Falletto to the left. Every road sign was plastered with familiar producer’s logos - Borgogno, Giacosa, Mascarello, Scavino, Vajra etc. It got the blood pumping, as did the immediate stroll I took up the slope into the Paiagallo cru vineyard just behind the town. In 37 degree heat and 50% of the way up a 30% incline I was reminded of my 60% below average lack of form. I earned my beer. (NB. I always have a little ‘scoping’ walk upon arrival in a new place, which I then follow with a regional beer accompanied by some local dried sausage sliced up using a folding knife that I have found in a tobacconist along the way. Beer is always the best thing to do while in wine country).

The visit’s other motive was a meeting with the wonderful Signora Chiara Boschis who had kindly allocated us 480 bottles of her Dolcetto D’Alba DOC under her brand E. Pira e Figli. I wanted to have a good chat with her and take her picture a few times. However I wasn’t the only visitor she had to squeeze in at 3pm on Monday July 10th 2022 it quickly became clear. After me, punctual me, came a belated queue of other bodies: an Arizonan buyer, a Finnish buyer, a Swedish buyer, another Swede who said not one word, and one or two others. She only makes 6500 cases a year too, so little to go around! We started with a walk up the hill immediately behind the winery, again (🥵), into a cru vineyard called ‘Terlo’, which is a plot used in the blend of a Barolo wine called ‘Via Nuova’ that Chiara was famously awarded a perfect 100 point score.

As we stood around listening, pretending we weren’t sweaty (we nearly lost a corpulent Swede), we bore witness to Chiara’s youthful energy. It was just gorgeous, and her passion is thrilling. She is circa 60 years old and most impressively didn’t crack a bead of sweat. It was hard to get a word in, she is full pelt. Chiara is unmarried, instead, wedded to her craft. She jovially and yet proudly explains to us that she could have ‘married vineyards’ but instead chose to buy them (It must be said that marrying strategically for the acquisition of very lucrative ‘cru’ vineyards is not uncommon yet commonly not talked about in many illustrious wine regions of the old world). She talked about the soil, sites and vineyard practices, too little rain, too much rain, pests and diseases, etc etc, all the things real farmers like to talk about. She showed deep connection to the land and a thorough understanding of her trade, but never pretended she knew everything.

It is obvious Chiara is a stalwart in the region too. She managed to single-handedly convince nearly all growers in Barolo to take the organic pathway with their vineyards (A necessary target if anyone wants to achieve Organic Certification because of the close adjacency of plot ownership, but ultimately a mutualistic undertaking). She was one of the only two women winemakers in Barolo in the early days and has cleared the path for more women like herself in the region. Her niece was working with her in the winery the day I visited, she had just come back from a stage in an Australian winery. Chiara was the only girl ‘Barolo Boy’ too, a change-of-practice movement in the 1980’s that really put Barolo and the Langhe region on the world stage, the corollary of which was The Langhe being made a Unesco World Heritage Site (as captured in the 2014 documentary film of the same name by Paolo Casalis and Tiziana Gaia).