2023 Cieck Erbaluce di Caluso Piedmont 750 ml

Italian white wines are mounting an incredible renaissance lately, as youthful scions of multi-generation families revive abandoned vineyards and resurrect long-lost varieties. They’re also improving on past techniques, making world-class wines at prices that reflect what they were a generation ago, not what they are now.

One single bottle to prove that point: the 2023 Cieck Erbaluce. This is one of the greatest success stories of the modern revival of Erbaluce, one of Italy’s native grapes. Cieck helped raise the profile of this distinctive grape to the point that it won its own DOCG status in 2010, and no local producer transmits the gorgeous terroir of the Canavese region better than they do.  

The winery was founded in 1985 by Remo Falconieri. His daughter Lia and Domenico Caretto now run the winery, and in their capable hands, the ancient Erbaluce grape yields a riveting wet-stone energy, as though scooped out of a rushing mountain stream with a tin cup. 50-year-old vines, trained on pergola trellises unique to the area, capture all these gorgeous notes in high-definition, low-yield clarity—and in amounts far too small to ever match our appetite.

The Erbaluce name comes from the words “light” and “grass,” reflecting its leafy complexity and nodding to the sunlight that fosters its slow ripening. The grape’s origins are lost to history, but records of it date back to the 1600s. It grows nowhere in the world but this tiny pocket, like a fragile dialect in danger of being forgotten forever.

We, along with Cieck, won’t let that happen, because this expression of glacial soils, rendered in beautiful acidity and freshness, is not just invaluable—it’s one of our favorites in the Piedmont canon.