Chiussuma - Farinel 2022
We are drinking a bottle of Farinel 2022 from Chiussuma from Piedmont.
Wine shopping is more dangerous than usual when someone stares at the screen from behind with a slightly offset gaze. On one hand, it’s like a time-delayed text-to-speech overlay that reads everything to you again, and on the other hand, your ear is jolted out of its peace here and there by a very loud, very close “I want that one.” And then she wants it, and then you just buy it. Otherwise, it hurts too much in the ear. Sometimes it goes so far that the inner ear gently winces when scrolling past, even without an external sound. By the way, this happens almost exclusively with animal labels. So, dear winemakers, animal labels are the thing.
The beverage behind the animal label today comes from the Carema region in Piedmont. Significantly less than 100 hectares of vineyard area remain on terraces, and this area, at over 300 meters above sea level, is mostly planted with Nebbiolo. The vines grow on the terraces on traditional pergolas, whose maintenance with wooden beams and stone foundations means extra effort. Even smaller is the area of the Chiussuma winery, which was only founded in 2016 by Matteo and Rudy with wife Alessandra. They manage just three hectares of vineyards together. The Farinel is the red base wine of the winery, which, depending on the source and vintage, consists mostly of Nebbiolo with a small proportion of indigenous Ner d’Ala. So I don’t know exactly whether this vintage is single-varietal or almost single-varietal. The wine spends about two weeks on the skins and then lands in used wooden barrels for a year and a half.
It smells a bit like red fruit tea, berries, and a touch of underbrush in the background. The wine has real pull on the tongue, is fresh, juicy, and of course the berries appear again. Contrary to what is typically said about Nebbiolo, the tannin is tame and rather in the background. You can fulfill the wine’s purpose in pretty large gulps. The second glass smells, in addition to fruit tea and underbrush, somewhat of pastry and leather. It’s surprisingly uncomplicated, without being trivial.
And not much changes overnight either. It’s still extremely young and probably not meant to be laid down. More herbaceous than fruity, cherry, berries, and almost even less tannin on the tongue than on the first evening. Surprisingly, the wine works excellently with Krautschupfnudeln (sauerkraut potato noodles). Honestly, this isn’t a pairing I would have come up with on my own. It’s more a happy chain of temporal circumstances. The weekly vegetable box delivered a bag of sauerkraut a few weeks earlier, which has been quietly calling “cook me” from the refrigerator ever since. And the brainwave of Krautschupfnudeln fell on precisely this Saturday when the Farinel was waiting in the refrigerator. And what can I say, it just works. The freshness, the fruit, and the spice, together with the hearty potato noodles. Perfect for a cool Saturday evening in the darker half of the year.