Strada delle Vino Pinerolese

Last Monday we accepted and attended a very welcome invitation to join in the discussion about establishing a wine road designation for our very own Pinerolese DOC wine. Our Torino provincial representatives have proposed to make a designated wine road recognizing our local wines as distinct and note worthy. This is good news indeed and as one of our friends up the road, owner of Lago Laux, a popular and well known restaurant, noted, "It should have been done 30 years ago." I could agree more with Franco, but sometimes it takes an inordinate amount of time to get things moving around here. Or as they always seems to say in response here, "piano, piano...which is the equivalent of "take it easy". So we are on our way to being on the map so to speak, finally, for our wine production in our area. Pineroloese wine includes the surrounding areas of Bricherasio where we have the community collective cantina where many small growers bring their grapes together to produce their wine and as I have noted before you can "filler up rosso", the surrounding areas of Pinerolo, where our friends the Dora family make their delicious range of wines, and up into our Chisone valley to Pomaretto, whose small vineyard we look down into from our balcony on a daily basis. Our small vineyard in Pomaretto produces 800 bottles a year of Ramie' making a bit of a boutique wine, but in our backyard and a particular wine for this valley.

It just nice to see our area be recognised for it's wine contribution in addition to all of our other fine local Torino province foods, that have long been recognised for their superior quality, flavor and diversity. It's about time the Provincia sits up and takes notice and help build on our strengths to reach a wider audience. It should help create more opportunities for small wine producers and other peripheral businesses.

We were also encouraged that they had the forethought to invite a wide variety of local business that stand to benefit from this promotion, like hotel, B&Bs, agriturismi, restaurants and other assorted business to ask them to participate in creating this designation. Bravo. Roughly 70 people from all of these business fields that I named showed up to engage in the conversation, which I thought was a good showing for a last minute invitation, (which is the usual case in Italy) for an inaugural idea and process, because as i stated earlier, things take an inordinate amount of time, ..."piano, piano". Anyway, the discussion was lively and there definitely was bit of a buzz of excitement and anticipation with some solid suggestions for spin off benefits ad ideas and we're off on the way to a wine road for rounding up some of those tourists that are wandering around wondering where to go and what to do, just in case you were at loose ends for something to do. Bravi Provincia di Torino, Bravi!