Pedemontis Roero Arneis Arajs 2023
£18.45
The wine
A soft and refreshing Italian white from the Arneis grape, with a delicately aromatic bouquet of exotic fruit, pear and acacia honey. Grown on the Roero hills under closed-cycle farming, where a team of donkeys does the work a tractor would elsewhere.
Arneis is the white grape of the Roero, the sandy hills on the left bank of the Tanaro, and it came close to extinction in the 1960s. Its name means little rascal in Piedmontese, a comment on how awkward it is to grow. The sand gives a lighter, more perfumed wine than the marls across the river.
The producer
Pedemontis
View all Pedemontis winesPedemontis takes its name from the Latin for at the foot of the mountains, which is what Piedmont means. The wines come from vineyards across the Langhe and Roero, the two halves of the Tanaro valley that between them account for most of what southern Piedmont is known for.
The two are quite different. The Langhe, on the right bank, is calcareous marl and gives the great Nebbiolos; the Roero, on the left, is sandier and lighter, which suits Arneis and gives softer, more perfumed reds. Working both allows a range that covers Favorita and Arneis for whites through Barbera to Nebbiolo.
The wine names are in Piedmontese dialect rather than Italian, which is a small act of local loyalty in a region whose language is genuinely distinct from Italian and increasingly little spoken. Favorita in particular is worth attention: it is the same variety as Vermentino, grown in Piedmont for centuries and almost abandoned in favour of Arneis.
