Faced with choosing between a degree in physiotherapy or one in winemaking, Riccardo Boggio chose “the way of alcohol”.
Looking at his family history, Riccardo’s fate to become one of the most exciting wine producers in Canavese was far from guaranteed.
“My parents don’t drink alcohol, but my grandfather and great-grandfather had one vineyard in Canavese and made wine for their own consumption. It was not a beautiful place for a vineyard, it was flat. Today cereals are planted around there, not grapes.”
His choice to become the first person in his family to make wine commercially, and of a high quality, came about during a gap year gig working at the now-closed Trattoria BarbaToni near Caluso.
“I took a year out after high school to get ready for the university exams to become a physiotherapist and I worked at this restaurant. The chef there showed me the world of wine and the possibility of studying to become an oenologist”
“He showed me the way of alcohol.” Spoken like a true student.
Physiotherapy’s loss was Piemontese wine’s gain. Riccardo took his first year in Turin, studying agriculture and forestry, before specialising in winemaking at Alba.
Theory will only take you so far
Work experience at the Cantina della Serra (a cooperative in Canavese) and in Barolo allowed him to practice what he had studied. In 2018 he began making his own wines at the weekend.
“You start with work and time. I began by making 600 bottles, but it was a second job as I was working at another cellar in the week and worked on my own wines on Saturday and Sunday. You have to work, work, work.”
Although he had spent time in Langhe, Riccardo stayed true to his native Canavese. He was especially besotted with the Serra Morenica di Ivrea, a 15 mile-wide ridge of glacial soil.
“I chose the Serra Morenica first of all because it’s a beautiful place. At university I tasted a lot of wine from there and fell in love with it.”
Hailing from Ivrea, Riccardo’s eagerness to produce wine from the Serra Morenica could be considered a case of ‘local pride’, but he genuinely believed, and still does, that it was a place worth betting on.
“I started in 2018 and before then there were already vintages which were very wet and vintages which were very hot in Piemonte, but I thought the Serra had the ability to weather climate change. It has the right exposition and the right varieties, so it was the right place to invest.”
One particular asset of this area is the tradition of pergola-training vines, the large leafy canopy providing shade for the bunches dangling beneath, something which is especially important for preventing Erbaluce, the key white variety of this part of Northern Piemonte, from becoming an overripe sugar bomb.
“You protect the grapes from the sun, it slows maturation of the polyphenols and sugars, giving a more complete ripening.”
Before Riccardo could buy any vineyards he had to show the owners that he, as a young winemaker, was serious, renting plots and working under the watchful eye of the elderly growers who had harvested them for decades.
“The vineyards were owned by the old generation. There aren’t many in the new generation working with vineyards, they prefer jobs with more money. The old generation want to see the quality of the work. I work alone, so I have to think about the cellar, the normal work in the vineyard, and the work that the property wants. You have to find a compromise between how you want to work and how the vineyard owner wants you to work.”
Only once he had passed these tests was he permitted to get his chequebook out.
Becoming Kalamass
Where Riccardo did not have to compromise was with the identity of this new business.
He settled on ‘Kalamass’, the name given to the Serra by the Celtic population which lived here before the armies of Rome conquered it on their relentless march northwards to Gaul and to imperium.
“The Celtic population were in Canavese and on the Serra before the Roman Empire, that is the real essence of the area. It was before globalisation. I chose the old roots of Canavese, not the culture which came afterwards with the Romans – it is the real origin of this land.”
One giveaway that ‘Kalamass’ is not a Latin-derived name is that neither native Italian nor Piemontese have a letter ‘k’. As someone of Celtic extraction myself, and with the sunburn on my visit to his vineyard to prove it, it’s nice to see some recognition of pre-Roman peoples.
For a motto he chose the much more Italian (and modern) ‘nuove radici’, or ‘new roots’, a nod to the fact that he is a young arrival from another part of Canavese.
“The difficult part about founding a winery is money, of course. When I was working in another cellar I only paid rent to the owner. In 2021 when I bought the house where I would put my cellar, my parents helped me, even though they don’t drink wine. That is a beautiful thing to me.”
This article was originally published on our Substack.