The Man Who Hunts Two Things
Giampaolo Pira is a truffle hunter.
Not as a metaphor. He goes out before light with a dog, into the oak and hazel woods below Serralunga, and looks for the thing that takes the longest to find and can never be planted or forced. He has been doing this since childhood. His father did it too. The Langhe produces both the wine and the truffle, and the families who grew up here tend to move between both without ceremony.
I think about this when I taste his Vigna Rionda. The parallels are too obvious to ignore and too accurate to leave alone. Truffle hunting and Barolo farming are both patience disciplines. Both require you to learn a specific piece of ground over many years until you understand its patterns — where it holds moisture, where it warms first in the morning, what it produces in a dry autumn versus a wet one. Both reward attention, so accumulated, it becomes instinct.
Both produce something that cannot be replicated outside the specific soil where it forms.
Giampaolo's Vigna Rionda is the same. He farms his parcel on the hill with the attention of someone who has been studying the same piece of ground for decades, who knows what it requires and when, who has learned to read it the way a truffle hunter reads the forest floor.
Two different searches. The same quality of listening.
He finds both.
Luigi Pira farms Margheria, Marenca, and Vigna Rionda in Serralunga d'Alba. Five generations. The fifth generation — Annalisa and Elena — joined in 2020.
