The city’s wine community is a budding and inspiring one, and it’s folks like our good friend Randall Bush of Loci Wine who spark a pure curiosity and excitement for wine in us. His small import & distribution company, Loci Wine, is an homage to the places these wines hail from as well as the shared spaces and human hands that make this all possible – reminding us that wine has always been about history, culture, humanity, and love (for our Earth, for one another). We’re delighted to feature a shop favorite from Randall’s pensive book for tomorrow’s tasting: Luca and Carolina Valfaccenda from Roero, Piedmont. Listening to Randall speak about wine and reflect on its importance has always moved me, so I’d like to share some words from the man himself on the allure of Valfaccenda:
“Since 2010 when Luca and Carolina reclaimed his family’s lands after making wine in both Barolo and the Roero, their wines have been recognized for their incredible combination of clarity and depth, texture and purity – wines that, for them, could only be made by light hands and from fruit grown on the steep, sandy soils of the Roero.
Luca and Carolina have in recent years expanded friendships with winemakers across Italy and France, and have even begun to make wines from friends’ vineyards in Italy, further north and east into the Asti zone. The project of these wines, called bis-esti vini (leap year wines), arose out of the culmination of increasingly difficult climate conditions in the Roero – in particular, devastating hail activity in 2020. This has been an opportunity both to utilize young estate fruit in unique ways (the partially carbonic Nebbiolo of Vindabeive, and their youngest Arneis with friends’ Cortese in Bis-lacco Bianco), but also to bring Luca’s careful hand and deft cellar work to new grapes, including the beautifully fresh Freisa in Bis-turna. Winemaking here is similar to the all-estate wines: light skin-contact for the whites, gentle macerations in concrete for the reds, with aging predominantly in concrete.
Like Luca and Carolina themselves, the wines of Valfaccenda are generous but thoughtful, energetic but not at all simple, clear in their vision but never strident.”
We will taste the three wines listed above, jovial bottlings that come from wonderfully loving human beings. How beautiful this world of wine is – let’s cheers to that as the first chill, fall evening unfolds.