La Raia

The Free Bacchus Story

Biodynamic farming was never really an idea about wine. Rudolf Steiner's argument was that a farm should behave like a single organism, feeding itself rather than buying its fertility in, and the vineyard is meant to be one organ among several. Most estates that carry a Demeter certificate are, in practice, vineyards with a compost heap.

La Raia is the other kind. The property runs to about two hundred hectares in the hills above Novi Ligure in southern Piedmont, and only sixty-five of them are vines. The rest is cereal fields, pasture, chestnut and acacia woodland, hives, and a herd of Fassone cattle. The manure has somewhere to come from and the compost has somewhere to go, which is the whole mechanism the certificate was written to describe.

The Rossi Cairo family bought the farm in 2002 and converted it more or less immediately. Between the rows they grow green manure and turn it in, aerate the soil hard, and spray nothing but sulphur and copper in defined windows — the two treatments organic growers are still permitted and the two that every organic grower argues about.

The wine is Gavi, which is made from Cortese and is one of the whites Italy exports most and explains least. At its worst it is a neutral restaurant white. Grown properly it is lean and high-acid, closer to green apple and white flowers than to anything tropical, with a chalky edge; the Riserva from the Vigna della Madonnina is the version made to be kept rather than drunk on the day it is opened.

Both certificates were read where they are issued: Valoritalia's in the EU's TRACES system, and Demeter Italia's in its own operator directory. That is a rarer result than it sounds. Of the estates we checked this month claiming both, this is one of the few where both were actually there.