Fiorentina Cortese Grasso (1933 – 2018)

Beloved Nonna of Cà del Baio

Nonna Fiorentina of Cà del Baio’s Grasso family lost her soulmate in early 2014 when her husband Ernesto died peacefully at the age of 92. As I watched her in the four years that followed the passing of “Supernonno,” as his granddaughters refer to him, Fiorentina’s heart never seemed to mend. I believe it is true that one can die of a broken heart. Finally, on April 8, 2018, nonna Grasso joined her beloved Ernesto in peaceful slumber.

I loved her very much. We didn’t speak the same language of the tongue, but our hearts connected and spoke to one another over our shared loved of her family and her land. I shall miss her very much.

In honor of nonna Fiorentina, and all the wonderful women of her generation, I would like to share excerpts from my book taken from her stories she told to me through her granddaughters, Paola, Valentina, and the youngest, Federica, who, for me, played the role of the family historian and conveyed stories and emotions that came from deep inside her soul. Federica brought to life for me the childhood she shared with her sisters at Cà del Baio, showered in love, but with the discipline of a strong work ethic that is clearly evident today in all that the sisters do as they work alongside their parents, Giulio and Luciana. The value of the “nonna factor” in the lives of Piemonte’s wine families can never be overstated, and, God-willing, will never cease to exist.

Building the House of the Bay Horse

Ernesto and Fiorentina Grasso

One half of the land of Cà del Baio came from Giuseppe “Pinin”
Grasso’s initial Barbaresco acquisition in 1870. The other half of the Cà del Baio patrimonial equation came from Fiorentina Grasso, neé Cortese, Federica’s paternal grandmother, wife of Ernesto.
Fiorentina’s family was originally from Mango, a village about six miles east from Treiso. Her grandfather Luigi Sterpone purchased a farm and the Asili vineyards on the outskirts of Barbaresco in 1903. Luigi chose Barbaresco over the larger village of Neive because of the farm’s close proximity to Asili’s prime southwest-facing
Nebbiolo vines.

Valle Grande, home to Giulio and Luciana Grasso and the family’s Cà del Baio winery. Photo credit: Pierangelo Vacchetto.

Knowing a little history of Barbaresco’s awakening in the late 19th century is helpful in understanding the life and times of the early Grasso farmers. Until the middle of the 20th century, with exceptions, Barbaresco farmers commonly sold their grapes to negotiants, brokers who in turn sold to the few large wineries. The farmers only made enough wine for family consumption. Often, farmers found themselves at the mercy of unscrupulous negotiants who were known to bide their time on market days in the Piazza Savona in Alba while farmers sat helplessly as their grapes cooked in the hot sun. Only when the negotiants were certain the farmers were desperate would they make an offer to buy the crops. Quality was not an issue in those days. Only quantity.

The first attempt to change this unfair business model came in 1894. Domizio Cavazza, Piemonte’s oenological icon and founder of the prestigious Scuola Enologica di Alba, envisioned a way for
Barbaresco to compete with the more advanced Barolo denomination while improving the lot for local farmers. Cavazza, with nine
Barbaresco vintners, founded the Cantina Sociale di Barbaresco, the first Barbaresco cooperative. Cavazza’s ingenious cooperative produced wine and provided a fair market for farmers throughout the Barbaresco denomination. The Fascists closed the struggling cooperative in 1925. In 1958, a revered local priest, Don Fiorino
Marengo, created the second Barbaresco cooperative in a church basement with 19 family grape growers. Five decades later, with 52 members, Produttori del Barbaresco remains Italy’s largest wine cooperative, producing extraordinary Nebbiolo wines.

Cà del Baio’s current patriarch is Giulio Grasso. His maternal great-grandfather, Francesco “Cichin” Cortese, a founding member of the Cantina Sociale, married Ernesta Sterpone. Francesco went to work in the Sterpone family’s Asili vineyard in the early 1900s. Their daughter Fiorentina, Giulio’s mother, would carry the prized Asili vineyard into the Grasso family through her dowry.

Although the practice of paying dowries faded into history in the mid-20th century, it was in earlier times a common vehicle by which property passed to another family. In those days, there was no such thing as dating, so matchmakers, known as bacialé in Piemontese, were an important part of society. Bacialé not only found brides for grooms, but they often mediated the transfer of property, transactions fraught with deep emotion, particularly for brides’ families as they surrendered control of parcels of land.

In 1953, Luigi Grasso died. His only son, Ernesto, the youngest of five children, inherited the patrimony. Soon after, Ernesto married. The 1955 marriage between Fiorentina Cortese and Ernesto Grasso was a love match, but it was also a formidable real estate transaction. The union of the Cortese family’s grand Asili vineyards and the Grassos’ extensive holdings in Treiso formed the viticultural foundation of the house of the bay horse, Cà del Baio.

Ernesto and Fiorentina Grasso on their wedding day.
Super Nonni at Ca’ del Baio.

In the difficult post–World War II years in a wine region yet to make its name, the couple forged a bond that remained strong until Ernesto’s death at the age of 92 in 2014. Fiorentina and Ernesto had two children, Giulio and Franca. Giulio followed his father into the wine industry where he worked at the Produttori del Barbaresco until 1987, when he joined his father at the family’s winery.

Ernesto and Fiorentina Grasso with their children, Giulio and Franca.
Giulio and Luciana Grasso bottle wine with their daughters, Valentina and Federica. Photo Credit: Pierangelo Vacchetto

Revered Ernesto Grasso — known as “Super Nonno” to his grand-daughters — was a kind, sweet, and very quiet man, much like his mother, Lina, according to Federica. His son Giulio inherited those special qualities from his father. I was privileged to have known Ernesto, albeit our communications were through smiles and warm handshakes. We didn’t speak the same language, but we loved the same things — Cà del Baio, its wine, and most of all its family.

Ernest and Fiorentina left behind a vibrant legacy and a beautiful family in whose hands Cà del Baio will continue to flourish. Photo Credit: Elisabetta Vacchetto

 

Albino Rocca (1924 – 2017)

Albino Rocca

Fortunately, since Labor of Love: Wine Family Women of Piemonte was published on June 2, 2016, I have only had to memorialize one passing member of a wine family. That was Carlo “Carlin” Deltetto in
August 2017. One month later, Albino Rocca, beloved nonno of Daniela, Monica, and Paola Rocca, passed away at 93.

In honor of Albino, I wanted to share a few excerpts from the book that intersected my life with his and his family’s. I cherish the memories made in the short time I spent with him and his granddaughters in their tasting room of the winery bearing his name.

Excerpt from Labor of Love: Wine Family Women of Piemonte

When I first visited the Rocca sisters in 2014, I interviewed their grandfather Albino, then 90 years young. Although he had lost his wife, daughter, and son in the previous 10 years, he appeared at peace, comforted by the love that his three granddaughters showered upon him. In a mixture of Piemontese dialect and Italian, Albino spoke with me through Daniela and Monica. We chatted a bit about his boyhood growing up in the vineyards, a boyhood spent in the dark years before and during World War II. When I asked him about the German occupation and life in the vineyards of Barbaresco during that dark time, a shadow passed across Albino’s craggy face punctuated by laugh lines and wrinkles from his long life under the Langhe sun. “It was a very hard life,” he said with a heavy sigh. “It was difficult to get food.” Germans, Fascists, and partisans alike helped themselves to food and animals that provided sustenance to farming families.

Various factions of partisan resistance fighters fought Germans and the Fascist Black Brigade in the vineyards and forests of Barbaresco. Civilians often were caught in the crossfire, executed for aiding partisans or targeted for collective punishment for the resistance fighters’ attacks. Albino recalled one such retaliation for the partisans’ capture of several German soldiers. Smoke billowed across the landscape as several large homes and barns the Germans and Fascists had torched burned to the ground. It wasn’t enough for the brutal occupiers to destroy property. They needed blood to be shed to further terrorize the populace into submission. I also had heard this story from Fiorentina Grasso of Cà del Baio, who is a few years younger than Albino. According to Albino, as the Germans prepared to shoot as many as 20 men and boys, the Bishop of Alba came to the rescue. Miraculously, the holy man was able to talk the partisans into releasing the Germans in exchange for the release of the villagers. Sadly, such attempts were rarely successful.

After Piemonte was freed from the shackles of war and occupation, the region awoke to a new wave in viticulture. Tsunamis start small, as did the tsunami of change that washed over the region in the second half of the 20th century. Little by little, the momentum of transformation built. In the mid-1940s, Giacomo began his wine business. First, he sold grapes to wineries through negotiants (grape brokers). Soon after, Giacomo began producing wine he sold in demijohns. The round, long-neck vessels held several gallons of wine and were the common wine vessel before bottles were mass-produced.

In 1960, Albino built his cantina and the house in which he raised his family and still lives. From their home at the top of the hill near the village of Barbaresco, Albino and his wife, Vittoria, and their two children Angelo and Giuditta had a commanding view of the amphitheater of vineyard-carpeted slopes below and of the Castello di Neive to the east. It’s the same view visitors to the winery enjoy today. Between 1960 and 1970, when his father, Giacomo, died, Albino sold most of his wine in bulk. Upon Giacomo’s death, Albino and his brother

Alphonso divided the ownership of the estate as was customary among farmers’ sons, and split the vineyards. Because Albino had already built his own house nearby, Alphonso took the family home where they were both born. In 1970, the year his father died, Albino began to put his own label on his wines, although the family considers 1960 as the winery’s founding, the same year Albino built the house and cantina.

Rocca family with Angelo and Albino
Albino’s beloved wife, Vittorina Marchisio Rocca (1926 – 2011)
Albino Rocca
Albino Rocca
Albino Rocca

Intersections of Joy and Grief in Piemonte

 

Much has happened in Piemonte in the two intervening years since I sent the last edits of Labor of Love: Wine Family Women of Piemonte into cyberspace to Verona in April 2016. Over 720 sun-
rises and sunsets. The designation of the vineyard landscape of Langhe, Roero, and Monferrato as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014  helped stimulate growth of the region’s already robust wine tourism. An iconic winery changed hands and Barolo’s Nebbiolo vineyard prices continued on a flight path to the stratosphere. And there were changes within the wine families that were intersections of joy and grief.

Sunrises. Sunsets.

Several Labor of Love families, such as Oddero (Barolo) and Marenco (Monferrato), gave life to new generations. Others, such as Sophie and Giuseppe Vaira of G. D. Vajra (Barolo), continued to add to the generation that began with the birth of their first child in spring 2013.

Sadly, some families had to say good-bye to remaining members of the generation that I call “Piemonte’s Greatest Generation,” the one that bridged the painful past of poverty, fascism, and Nazi occupation with the current era of great success and prosperity. These passings in Piemonte were painful.

In summer 2017, we lost one of Barolo’s most beloved and revered vintners — an authentic Barolo Boy —  Domenico Clerico. Unlike his older brethren who left us recently, he was a post-war child. Domenico, who always reminded me a bit of Shakespeare’s Puck, inspired and taught many younger producers who are now a part of Barolo’s great success story. The new year was only a few weeks old when Langhe legend Bruno Giacosa passed away. Grief touched three of my Labor of Love families with the passing of Roero pioneer Carlo “Carlin” Deltetto in August 2017 (see earlier post), Albino
Rocca in September 2017, and most recently, Fiorentina Grasso of Cà del Baio.

Nightfall in the Langhe.
Photo Credit: Pierangelo Vacchetto
Albino Rocca (1924-2017)

In 2017, in the midst of one of the most challenging harvests in memory, the three sisters of the Albino Rocca winery – Daniela, Monica,  and  Paola – bade a sad  farewell to their  beloved  nonno  Albino. In his 93 years he had witnessed the violence that engulfed the region in between 1943 and early 1945. He had felt the heartbreak of untimely loss of a young brother during World War II, then in the span of three years, his wife, his daugher, and, in October 2012, his son, Angelo. But in his final years, he also witnessed with pride and joy his three granddaughters and Paola’s husband, Carlo Castellengo, following ably in Angelo’s footsteps following his untimely death. Albino was there for them through four vintages without their iconic vintner father. He saw them awarded the Gambero Rosso’s coveted Tre Bicchieri for their 2013 Barbaresco Angelo from their first vintage without any earthly guidance from the wine’s namesake. Albino gave them love and provided guidance as they assumed control of the winery bearing his name that he had created decades before.

The Rocca Sisters, Carlo Castellengo, and Rocca family patriarch, their nonno Albino. Photo credit: Elisabetta Vacchetto.
Fiorentina Cortese Grasso (1933-2018)

Further down the road on the outskirts of another Barbaresco village, Treiso, on April 15, 2018, grief descended upon Giulio Grasso, his sister Franca, and their families. Fiorentina Cortese Grasso, beloved wife of the late Ernesto Grasso and final member of the oldest of four generations at Cà del Baio, passed away peacefully at home after a painful struggle with ill health. It would be just  like nonna Fiorentina to wait for the return from a business trip abroad of her oldest child’s oldest child, Paola, before she closed her eyes for the last time. Such was her grit and determination. What a gift to Paola to be able to say “good-bye.” The melancholy expression on Giulio’s face in a photo with his three daughters at Vinitaly days after her passing told the story of the deep sadness that has blanketed the family. But life goes on at Cà del Baio, as it always has. And that’s how nonna Fiorentina would want it to be. The product of Fiorentina and  Ernesto’s labor of love  is in good  hands with  Giulio, his  wife Luciana, and their three daughters, Paola, Valentina, and Federica. I will certainly miss seeing her at lunch in Cà del Baio, but like all Piemonte wine family matriarchs, her presence will be felt for a long time to come.

Generational bookends: Ernesto and Fiorentina Grasso with Lidia Deltetto, their great-granddaughter, the first of a new generation.

I know in coming years there will be more end-dates — more sunsets on long, productive lives —  that will have to be added to the 22
genealogies in Labor of Love. Although I will grieve over having to note more departures, I will take heart that these wonderful matriarchs and patriarchs trusted me with their stories so that those whose names I will add to the genealogies will always feel a connection with their deep roots in the Piemontese soil. Each sunset  shall be followed by a new dawn and new life on the land.

In honor of Albino Rocca and Fiorentina Grasso, in the coming posts I will share excerpts of their stories from Labor of Love.

 

Bringing Cucina Piemontese Home to Colorado

Bringing Cucina Piemontese Home to Colorado

No doubt I’m not alone in my frustration of trying at home, often with little or no success, what seemed so easy in a cooking class. Compounding the frustration is when that cooking class was half a world away and doesn’t translate well to a high country Colorado kitchen. Earlier this year I found a solution to that problem when I was leading a group on a gastronomic and cultural adventure in the iconic Italian wine region of Piemonte. I discovered Chef Enrico Trova of La Scuola di Cucina di Asti and cucina piemontese came home to Colorado with me.

Chef Enrico Trova making quick work of peeling Yukon Gold potatoes for gnocchi

Chef Trova’s 15 years in California, during which time the affable Italian chef owned and operated Amici of Beverly Hills, enabled him to understand the limitations that his American clients face when they return home and try to recreate the dishes he taught them. His Gnocchi al Ragu Piemontese – sausage (salsiccia) ragu on gnocchi – is one of his recipes at home in any kitchen anywhere.

Salsiccia ragu with gnocchi

This dish has become a new favorite of mine to cook in my Rocky Mountain high country kitchen. My Labor of Love tour guests enjoy learning to make this with Chef Trova and my guests around my table love it, too, particularly when paired with Barbera, one of Piemonte’s signature quintessential wines. I don’t have the patience or the time to make gnocchi always, so polenta, another staple of the cucina piemontese, makes a delicious accompaniment for this sauce. Keep in mind, however, that the starch from gnocchi adds a richness to the ragu that you can’t duplicate with polenta.

Just like the saying that great wine can only come from great grapes, delicious culinary results can only be achieved with fine ingredients. Of course, the Italians have us beaten on that one, even in their supermarkets. Chef Trova uses the king of Piemontese sausage, salsiccia di Bra, a bovine (usually veal) sausage.

Salsiccia di Bra resulted from an exception in the Albertine Statutes of 1848 – the precursor to unified Italy’s first constitution – that all sausage must contain pork. You have to love the Italian’s reverence for food to the extent they codified sausage-making requirements in their first constitution. This was Charles Albert of Sardinia’s way of providing an alternative to pork sausage for the Jews of Cherasco, a bustling hilltop town nearby Bra. Today, pork finds its way into salsiccia di Bra, but the classic sausage is pure bovine.

Colorado Meat Company

Trying to find the prized sausage in ski country Colorado, or to pry the recipe out of a Piemontese, is impossible. Fortunately for meat lovers here in central Colorado we have a great resource for the sausage used in the ragu: Colorado Meat Company in Avon. Husband and wife team of Chris and Brittany Hudgens own the Colorado artisanal butchery they opened in August 2015.

Brittany and Chris Hudgens

It’s a risky business, but thanks to their dedication to high quality Colorado products and, equally important, excellent personalized customer service, Chris and Brittany have succeeded in carving out a niche for preserving the butchery craft in a high country region with a rich ranching history.

You won’t find delicious house-made brats like these at Colorado Meat Company  in a supermarket!

Each week Chris and his assistant Jake Lebowitz  prepare several different types of sausage from over 40 recipes in Chris’ repertoire. My favorite for salsiccia ragu is their Italian sausage. I use 2/3 hot to one-third sweet sausage for a perfect balance of heat, herbs Chris picks himself, and spices. Made from 100% Colorado sourced meat, this sausage is a perfect substitute for the salsiccia di Bra Chef Trova uses in his Asti kitchen. It’s best to call ahead and ask Brittany to reserve the sausage for you since it’s not made every week.

Butcher Chris Hudgens busy at work making one of his over 40 kinds of sausage.

So time to learn how to make it.

Chef Enrico Trova’s Salsiccia Ragu

Ingredients for six (6) main course servings:

2 pounds of bulk fresh sausage (avoid store bought!)

1 carrot, chopped

1 onion (purple or yellow), chopped

1 celery stalk, chopped,

1 clove of garlic, chopped

2/3 bottle of red wine (I like to use a good quality Barbera – either d’Asti or d’Alba – since it is a great pairing for this dish).

2 cups of tomato purée (passata rustica – Chef Trova describes this as “uncooked sauce”)

In a heavy 5-quart Dutch oven, sauté the sausage on medium-high heat until it begins to brown. Next, add the chopped vegetables (mirepoix) to the sausage. Sauté the sausage and vegetables until all the liquid has evaporated from the meat. This is an important step, so be patient. Lower the heat to medium. Pour the red wine to cover the meat and then add the tomato puree. Stir then simmer gently to boil off the alcohol. If the mixture is too dry, add a little water. Chef Trova warns not to add stock or more wine since that will alter the flavors at this point. Simmer covered for another 60 minutes to let the flavors meld. Add salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste.

For a traditional Piemontese dish, serve over polenta or gnocchi. But this is equally tasty over pasta, such as penne or rigatoni. You can top with grated Reggiano Parmigiano or Pecorino, or a dollop of fresh ricotta, or it’s simply delicious as is.

Variations: Colorado Meat Company’s Italian sausage is a perfect blend of seasonings, so I don’t have to add any other herbs or spices. But depending on the sausage you use and your own taste, you might have to get creative with herbs (e.g., thyme and oregano) and spices.

Suggested wine pairing: Barbera d’Alba from producers such as E. Pira e Figli (Chiara Boschis), Paolo Scavino, Sottimano, and Mauro Molino, all of which are readily available in Colorado through Giuliana Imports. Or just pop into Riverwalk Wine and Spirits in Edwards and ask owner Jarrett Osborne for guidance.

If you’d like more of Chef Enrico Trova’s traditional Piemontese recipes, including his gnocchi recipe and technique, please email me at suzanne@winefamilies.com.