Vespolina

The story

Vespolina's own story is really Alto Piemonte's story. DNA studies (Raimondi et al. 2020; D'Onofrio et al. 2020) confirm it as Nebbiolo's offspring, grown since at least the 18th century in the pre-Alpine foothills of Novara, Vercelli and Biella — though a 1436 vineyard deed for a plot at 'al Zoppo' in Lessona already shows organised vine-growing there 235 years before Comino Sella bought neighbouring land in 1671, explicitly as an investment of surplus cash from the family's wool business. The same Sella family later founded Banca Sella (1886) and the Club Alpino Italiano (1863) — one family, four centuries, three completely different institutions — with Lessona DOC recognition arriving in 1976. Vespolina itself was rarely bottled alone: Italy's own 1962 ampelographic scheda records that pure varietal Vespolina in the Novarese was produced only 'in small quantities for family use' — its real historical job was always as Nebbiolo's minority blending partner. That role, and the region itself, nearly disappeared: phylloxera and 20th-century industrialisation shrank Alto Piemonte from tens of thousands of hectares (Les 5 du Vin: '50 times more' than today) to roughly 800ha across two DOCG and eight DOC. Today Vespolina's revival rides Nebbiolo's own comeback — a German trade source reports Langhe producers now investing in Alto Piemonte because climate change favours it, replanting 'the old varieties Bonarda and Vespolina' alongside Nebbiolo.

Insider story

Alto Piemonte's disciplinari make bold historical claims inside binding legal text — several don't survive contact with biography. Gattinara DOCG's regulation states outright that in 1525 Mercurino Arborio di Gattinara, Charles V's Grand Chancellor, 'gave barrels of local wine to the European Courts' — but his own Italian Wikipedia biography, covering that same year's Pavia campaign in detail, never mentions wine at all. Sizzano's disciplinare makes an equivalent claim for Camillo Benso di Cavour, crediting Italy's first Prime Minister with the wine's modern fame — again unconfirmed against his standard biography. Even 'famous since Pliny the Elder' — which sounds like real ancient testimony — recurs almost verbatim across THREE separate disciplinari (Ghemme, Fara, Coste della Sesia), a sign of copied regional boilerplate, not three independent citations. Boca's text, tellingly, skips the Pliny line and instead claims vine-growing there predates Roman colonisation. Fara does better: a real, physically extant 2nd-century Roman sarcophagus at Fara Novarese, its cartouche inscription naming the deceased as a wine trader. On the human scale, a German source dates the Brigatti family's founding planting of Nebbiolo, Uva Rara and Vespolina together to 1901, then describes the following decades as a region gripped by 'a severe identity crisis' after phylloxera, winegrowing demoted to a side-job for people who worked by day in city factories or the Vercelli rice paddies. And the myths cut both ways: a real, on-record producer (Ioppa's Andrea Ioppa) claims in a published interview that Vespolina is 'a progenitor of the Nebbiolo' — precisely backwards from what the DNA papers establish — while English Wikipedia's own listing of 'Uva Rara' as a Vespolina synonym turns out to be a documented error, flatly contradicted by Italian Wikipedia's own ampelographic ruling that the two 'have nothing to do with each other.'

Technical deep dive

Vespolina ripens mid-to-late (French ampelography: 'approximately 35 days after Chasselas,' 3rd epoch; the 1962 Registro Nazionale scheda gives budbreak ~15 April, flowering 5-15 June, véraison ~10 August, maturity 25-30 September). Vigour is moderate, yield 'regular not high,' clusters loose/cylindrical-conical ('spargolo') — the 1962 scheda calls the vine unsuited to Alto Piemonte's traditional expansive training systems, needing improvised short-Guyot or Sylvoz workarounds and short-cane pruning (echoing Pietro Selletti's 1877 note). Historic rootstocks: 420A, Kober 5BB, 3309, 101/14, Berlandieri×Riparia 420/A; Rupestris du Lot was 'in abbandono' by 1962. An unresolved technical puzzle from the same primary source: growers (especially in Oltrepò Pavese) blame American rootstock grafting for excess unripe green berries in Vespolina bunches, while experienced Novarese growers instead link it to organically-rich soils regardless of rootstock — cause never settled. Disease risk: rachis desiccation (worse on acidic, calcium-poor soils), downy and powdery mildew — powdery mildew's spread is cited as a specific contributor to the variety's historical abandonment. Winemaking is deliberately restrained: barrique 'used sparingly to avoid excessive aromatics,' preferring steel, concrete or large old wood (botte grande); Les 5 du Vin documents growers using carbonic maceration specifically on Croatina and Vespolina. Sensory (WSET-SAT): brilliant ruby with violet reflections; red fruit (raspberry, cherry), violet, black pepper, sweet spice, subtle balsamic on the nose; medium-plus to high acid; fine/medium tannin; medium body ('rarely achieves Nebbiolo's intensity when vinified alone'). The pepper signature is institutionally attributed to rotundone: Fondazione Edmund Mach research (Fulvio Mattivi with Daniele Nanni and Leonardo Valenti), published in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, found rotundone in Vespolina and Schioppettino at up to 560 ng/L — 35x the perception threshold (attributed via wine-trade press; the peer-reviewed paper itself was not directly read, 403'd). Berry skin: dark blue-black, thin, not very firm; juice colourless to very lightly pink — not a teinturier grape.

Industry secrets

The eight Alto Piemonte disciplinari reveal real structural differences hidden behind similar-sounding rules: Gattinara alone gives Vespolina its own individual 4% solo cap (plus a combined 10% ceiling with Uva Rara); Ghemme, Lessona, Boca, Fara and Sizzano instead set only a JOINT Vespolina+Uva Rara ceiling with no individual split — and Fara and Sizzano's Article 2 text turns out to be byte-for-byte identical (same Nebbiolo 50-70% range, same joint 30-50% ceiling), resolving two internally-contradictory claims that had each invented a different, wrong split. Bramaterra is the outlier: Nebbiolo can legally fall to 50% (vs 85-90%+ everywhere else), with Croatina as a genuine second variety and Vespolina+Uva Rara filling the rest. Coste della Sesia is the only one of the eight with NO mandatory ageing clock at all. On the market side: no auction records exist for Vespolina in any language, and critical coverage is thin — Falstaff's dedicated Vespolina page is unreachable, so specific scores are unconfirmed, but Vinous DOES track Tenute Sella's Bramaterra across seven vintages (2010-2019) at an average 90/100, peaking at 93/100 in 2017. The 'revival' narrative has real numbers behind it: at the 2019 'Taste Alto Piemonte' fair, roughly half of ~50 participating estates were founded after 2000, two-thirds after 1990, ten under 10 years old. And notably, of the eight disciplinari's own 'legame con l'ambiente' legal text, only Sizzano's names a specific Vespolina-relevant aromatic descriptor ('sentori di violetta') — the pepper/rotundone story used throughout wine-trade marketing appears nowhere in Alto Piemonte's actual regulatory language.

For collectors

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