Piedmont, Italy
The Cieck estate was established in 1985 by Remo Falconieri, a typewriter designer for Olivetti and the son of a farmer. He chose to focus almost exclusively on Erbaluce, a high-acid, mineral-driven autochthonous white grape variety native to the Canavese district and initially it was just for fun. Now, at the age of 80-plus and with 13 ha under vine, Remo is widely regarded as a maestro of the variety and is still the first one into the cellar every morning. Cradled in the moraine amphitheater of Ivrea that was carved out by a glacier as it descended from Valle d’Aosta during the Pleistocene, dragging soils rich in both silicate and carbonate metamorphic rocks, lies the heart of the Erbaluce di Caluso DOCG and the purest expression of the Erbaluce grape and profound example of Canavese terroir.
There is a legend about the origin of Erbaluce that says that the glacial-carved hills of Caluso were once inhabited by nymphs. One day, a nymph named Alba (which is Italian for dawn) saw the sun and fell in love. But theirs was an impossible love since the two lovers could not meet, so the Moon decided that when the Sun next rose she would not leave the sky, allowing the Sun to secretly reach the earth to meet his beloved nymph. That eclipse gave birth to their daughter Albaluce, with eyes the color of the sky, so beautiful she became the object of such veneration that all the farmers and fishermen made offerings to her temple of their best goods until the resources of the lake and land were depleted and new land had to be created for cultivation. A canal was dug to let the waters of the lake flow out, but it failed and the flood swept over everything, spreading death. Albaluce wept with grief and her tears fell to the ground and transformed into a vine laden with bunches of juicy white grapes... and so Erbaluce was born.
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