The Vine Nobody Could Name
Romolo does not come to the tasting room.
He is in the vineyard. He is almost always in the vineyard. While Gianpaolo manages the cellar and Tiziana handles the visits and Annalisa and Elena carry the conversation forward, Romolo is moving through the Serralunga rows with the attention of someone who has been doing this for three decades and knows that what happens in the cellar is determined by decisions made months earlier, between the vines, by a person with their hands in the soil.
The brothers divided the work early. Gianpaolo took the cellar. Romolo took the land. No ceremony. The natural allocation of two people who grew up on the same farm and understood, without being told, which part of the work was theirs.
There is, in one of the Margheria parcels, an old Nebbiolo vine that nobody has been able to classify with certainty. The characteristics are unusual — yield pattern different from the surrounding plants, ripening slightly out of sequence. Romolo has watched it for years. It has been there since before he started watching. He has never removed it.
When I ask Gianpaolo about it, he shrugs. Romolo says leave it. So they leave it.
Some things resist naming. The Serralunga limestone resists quick reading too. The vine and the soil are, in that sense, well matched.
You tend what you cannot fully understand.
That is most of farming. Most of winemaking. Most of anything, if you are honest about it.
Luigi Pira, Serralunga d'Alba. Five generations. Romolo Pira manages the vineyards. Annalisa and Elena Pira joined in 2020.
