For me, making wine was a life choice: mine is not a family of farmers. Twenty years ago, when I decided to become a winemaker, the first move was to buy some hills with meadows. I was looking for an uncontaminated environment , with a high biodiversity and I found it in the hamlet of San Lorenzo in Pozzol Groppo, a truly remote place, where the woods themselves defend the vineyards. I believe in holistic agriculture, to create a strong wine with character, which is protected by nature itself. I was uncompromising in my choice of varieties and never accepted compromises. I grow only native vines of the area , giving up part of the grapes to have stronger plants and healthy grapes, rich in the microbiological part, fundamental for the wine, which I obtain with spontaneous fermentations. Over the last 30 years, wine has stopped being a food to become an emotion. I give my wines all the time they need: they are living organisms and time is the first ingredient for success. A healthy wine becomes almost eternal if given time . After being bottled, a new life begins for him: he grows like every living thing, giving emotions.Paolo Carlo Ghislandi, manager and winemaker of the I Carpini company, is the man who gave life to Cascina di Pozzol Groppo as it is today. Purchased at the end of the nineties, he dedicated months of study, of actual listening , before designing the vineyards and cellar. The pedoclimatic characteristics in the farmhouse are excellent, but for wine production this was not enough: it was necessary to conceive a production system as close as possible to the ideal conditions for the ripening of the grapes and for the transformation into wine. And so it was. We are in the south-east of Piedmont, south of the Gavi region, in the Tortonesi Hills. These reliefs are the cradle of one of the most fascinating native vines in Italy: timorasso. It is a grape that has the gift, like only a few others, of developing types of aromas and flavors of incredible complexity as the years of maturation pass. Timorasso, similar to several other white species in the region, became rare after the phylloxera plague at the end of the 19th century, when new vineyards were replanted, often with Cortese grapes because they were easier to grow and had a higher yield. Paolo Carlo sees winemaking as a combination of art and nature and his products are referred to as Art Wines . It is no surprise that he works according to the dictates of organic viticulture, often following even more natural practices combined with the use of indigenous yeasts, low yields per hectare, few added sulphites, carefully controlled fermentations. The wines of I Carpini come to life in the glass , they are multifaceted, never banal, produced with universally known grapes such as Barbera or semi-unknown grapes such as Albarossa. And of course the Timorasso, the pivot around which the rebirth of the entire territory revolves, thanks to the intuitions of winemakers such as Paolo Carlo Ghislandi. A "local juice" where only the peculiarity of the vintage gives the stamp and uniqueness of each bottle. The wines of I Carpini take you by the hand and you must abandon yourself to their aroma and flavor . Paolo Carlo often says: "it's the wine that decides when it's ready, let's leave it to it and wait for it without haste". A natural, holistic approach towards the wine element, in its broadest and most territorial sense possible.Paolo Carlo Ghislandi
We have selected the following wines from the I Carpini company, and we asked Paolo Carlo to tell us about them:
Timorasso
Timorasso is a wild card, a winning but complex card. It comes from a more than native vine, originating from a micro-area in the province of Alessandria. It is a grape that has an ancient and new history at the same time, and is experiencing its renaissance today. An ancient vine, it was almost extinct in the past. For me, recovering it was a gamble, won thanks to considerable courage and a good dose of luck, and so today we find ourselves with a pure white wine, one of the most important in Italy. It belongs to the category of mineral wines, it is powerful, and for this reason it is not a simple wine. In fact, the hints of flowers (peach and mulberry) are mixed with sandy and salty scents for a beautiful complexity. You need an evolved palate to fully understand it. But it gives unprecedented satisfaction.Shadowlands Terre d'Ombra is a wine with a very nice story behind it. Autochthonous, it is the result of the professor's experiment. Dalmasso, who in 1938 pollinated barbera with Nebbiolo from Dronero (also called chatus). The result is surprising because it manages to bring out the best of the two vines: Barbera has its maximum exaltation (acidity, freshness, fruit), all within the tannic structure of Nebbiolo. Albarossa is like a Boer: morello cherry inside and cocoa all around. It is for this reason that Terre d'Ombra is a very successful wine: it is an intimately satisfying and quality wine, which also wears a good dress and therefore knows how to reach great connoisseurs, enthusiasts and novices.
