I’d known Nadia Curto casually for many years and been a big fan of her wines before the day she magically appeared at my elbow while my wife and I were shopping at the Alba Saturday market. She had an arm-full of groceries and, after a few minutes chatting, spontaneously invited us to her house for lunch. Turns out it was Nadia’s birthday and she was in the mood to celebrate! So Anne and I joined Nadia and her lovely family at her apartment just a few minutes’ walk from downtown Alba for a lovely afternoon-long feast and a wonderful deep dive into the world of her family’s wines! We’ve been fast friends ever since, even though, because they’ve led a peripatetic existence in the California marketplace, we’ve rarely had the opportunity to see her wine here at PRIMA. But this month, thanks to a hot tip from a friend, I did manage to run some down, and I’m very excited to bring them to you. Nadia’s family, you see, comes from the same driveway as her Uncle Elio,

Elio Altare that is. And both the families- Altare and Nadia’s father Marco Curto’s- farm adjacent parcels of the Arborina vineyard in the hamlet of Annunziata, part of the La Morra growing zone. Arborina is a small, south-facing vineyard surrounded by the larger Annunziata and Rocche dell’Annunziata MGAs- definitely the high rent district of La Morra! Nadia learned her stuff at her uncle’s knee while passionately lobbying her father to bottle his own Curto wine. In 2002 that happened, and Nadia set about systematically converting the entire operation to organic viticulture (not certified yet) and employing a more natural approach to her winemaking. Nadia eschews cultured yeasts, fining or filtering, and aims for the most natural possible expression of the vineyards she can create. She bottles two versions of the Arborina vineyard- a wine simply labeled Arborina that is produced a lot like Uncle Elio’s, and la Foia, the wine made from the oldest Nebbiolo in the vineyard and the most ‘traditionally made’ wine in the cellar. la Foia has always been Nadia’s signature wine and a brilliant expression of La Morra’s lower slopes. The soils here are packed with blue Tortonian clay. I remember slogging through Arborina two days after a rain with Silvia Altare in thigh-high rubber boots because of the foot-sucking mud- an experience quite unlike visiting the other side of the valley where the water just runs off the hardpan. This clay endows Curto’s Barolo with glorious darker-pitched fruit, more floral notes and earthy, truffle-y notes as well as a richness of texture one just can’t experience from the Serralunga side of Barolo. Its more obvious fruit may tempt you to believe it’s a more ready-to-drink, potentially shorter-lived wine than Diego Conterno’s but all that concentration belies a very strong armature underneath and this is another wine that will probably show its best at a decade past the vintage. 7500 bottles made! Decant!