This wine is layered and drinking beautifully! Aromas of red currants, black cherries, and licorice greet you, followed by light umami notes including earth, cured meat, and tobacco. Medium weight with moderate acidity and fine, integrated tannins. The palate is complex and quite savory, offering flavors of black olives, dried mushroom, and tree bark.  Orange zest, cherry pit, and nutmeg shine through, adding a touch of fruit and spice to the mix. 

 

 

Piedmont is located in northwest Italy, with Turin its major city.  Sub-alpine, it borders France and Switzerland internationally, Liguria and Lombardy within Italy.  Its viticulture expresses the longest-lived and most stable in Italy, and the region is home to the king of Italian wine, Barolo, as well as the queen, Barbaresco.  Both these wines are made from Nebbiolo, a very tannic black grape already famous in the time of Pliny.  Today, plantings are restricted by law to a few selected areas.  Nebbiolo is characterized by full flavor, balanced by high acidity and tannin, making its wines very long lived.  It is the first vine in the region to bud and the last to ripen.  Its name probably derives from nebbia, “fog,” which characterizes vineyards during the October harvest.

 

 

The Arlunno family has lived in Ghemme since the early 1500s, but the oldest documentation of vineyard ownership dates to only January 1800.  The vineyards were not the main family business, though they were passed down through the generations.  When Ghemme received DOC status in 1969, family head Carlo began rejuvenating existing vineyards and planting more.  In 1977, the farming estate became a winemaking estate, Antichi Vignetti di Cantalupo.  Significant investment in both vineyards and winemaking equipment has kept the estate in the forefront of quality wine production.

 

 

The grapes for this wine are sourced from three vineyards in Carella, Baraggiola and Valera. South and southeast facing, at 280-310 meters in elevation.  The morainic soil is crumbly rock, extremely rich in minerals.  Grapes were harvested by hand, destemmed (this reduces the tannins for which Nebbiolo is famous) and gently pressed (again, gentle pressing is a form of tannin management).  

 

 

Agamium is Latin for Ghemme, wine region already known during the Roman and Celtic eras.