Where do wine and history connect?  The change of grapes into wine, year in and year out, stands apart from the tumult of great events.  Can we taste the hopes of a people in their wine?  If the intensity of struggle and identity appears in any wine, it must surely be in the wines of the Piedmont –  the northwest corner of Italy which was once the heartland of nationalist aspiration.

Let’s choose 2007 Bricco delle Lepri Dolcetto di Dogliani from San Romano.  The label is unabashedly rural:  Bricco is a local word for “summit” or “top of the vineyard” where the finest grapes are thought to grow.  “Lepri” means “hares.”   So, “hill of the hares” — a  deeply agrarian name which does not call to mind ideological struggle.

The wine is excellent. It is inky, with the ripeness  of purple fruit — bruised, windfall plum and blackberry.  This wine has beautiful manners:  smoothly companionable and with just enough tannic structure or “bite” to offset its native sweetness.  “Dolcetto” — the name of the grape — does not refer to sugar but to the relative ease with which the vine, “the little sweet one,” is cultivated.

The region of Dogliani grew grapes long before 1046 when Oddo of Savoy added the Piedmont to his transalpine kingdom.  Occupied by Burgundians, wild Magyars, Saracens, and eight centuries of French overlords, the Piedmontese were among the first to rise up in favor of a unified, ethnically Italian state.

Can their wine have lagged behind?  Surely those plotters and revolutionaries of 1821 would have found little to sustain them in imported drink.  In these Piedmont wines, we seek an echo of the Risorgimento, the awakening of Italian aspirations, in a simple glass of wine.  It is a fragile thread which leads back into history, but the connection is real and the wine still comes from the same vineyard — the hill of the hares.

At Dedalus for $18.50  .

Tuta 8/24/09