Vittorio Garda, with his wife Martina Ghirardo, is the leading figure in the new wave of younger Carema figures and the only one with formal winemaking training and experience. Until recently, he has divided his time between being the winemaker for Cantina della Serra, the co-operative winery in nearby Canavese and creating and promoting Sorpasso. But he is a humble man who has learnt from both the older generation and the young producers in Carema. As he says, I will always be grateful for my technical training, but speaking with and tasting with producers who have applied artisanal techniques opened my mind. It made me freer.
Sorpasso currently cultivates grapes on 1.5 hectares consisting of four main plots in Carema, with an additional hectare expected soon, as well as more vines for white wine in the nearby village of Settimo Vittone. With his extensive experience, he is acutely aware that managing pergola-trained vines on terraces demands about 1,200 hours per hectare, which is twice the amount required for trellis-trained vines on less steep land. Although he has a small plot of trellis-trained vines, he greatly prefers the quality of his pergola-grown fruit. Like many of his peers, he has chosen a blend of organic, systemic, and alternative approaches (including essential orange oil) to combat mildew and other diseases, always opting for the minimum necessary. Another challenge is to maintain adequate fertility in the sandy soils. All of his plots contain soil comprising 70–75 per cent sand; five million years ago, Carema was a beach! He applies a mix of manure and vine cuttings to remedy this, which will decompose and nourish the vines.
Sorpasso’s Carema DOC is made from the traditional blend, 90 per cent Nebbiolo (Picotendro biotype) and the rest is made up of the ripest bunches of the local varieties, the Nerettos and Ner d’Ala. The wine is made, keeping the fruit from all the vineyard areas separately and blending later. In warmer vintages, some whole bunches are crushed and added to the juice. Fermentation in stainless steel and wood is started with a pied de cuve made from an unsprayed vineyard. Maceration on the skin lasts for a month and a half. Half of the must is subject to punch downs, and the cap is pushed below the surface for the other half.
Maturation for 12–18 months takes place in a mixture of barriques and tonneaux, all at least five years old. A second Carema, a single-vineyard wine called Vignealte is also made from the Calunnie subzone, Sorpasso’s highest vineyard at 450–500 metres elevation. Here, Nebbiolo makes up 95 per cent of the blend. Part of the wine is aged in a ceramic vessel which has just 10 per cent of the porosity of oak. Vittorio is happy to have a touch of reduction in the wine, which will open up with contact with air in the glass.
Vittorio takes his inspiration from a number of sources. Blind tasting Nebbiolo wines from across Piemonte is inspiring. But more than that, as a local, he is proud of the improvement of the Carema wines in the last 15 years, and he feels a responsibility to spread the message further around the world. ‘If you have a responsibility, you take it’, he says, quoting Luigi Einaudi, the second president of the Italian Republic and also a wine producer. Equally, if he is tempted to think that growing grapes in Carema is challenging, he thinks of his grandparent’s generation, who suffered the hardships of world wars and the poverty of the past. As Vittorio says, there is more to wine production than just technical knowledge. The name Sorpasso plays on Aesop’s fable, the hare and the tortoise: despite the hare initially surpassing the tortoise, Vittorio demonstrates that slow and steady wins the race.
