A love letter to... LANGHE
Mention Piedmont’s Langhe region to a lover of food and wine, and watch their eyes go as misty as the region’s ever-present fog. “At the foot of the mountain” is the literal translation of Piedmont, Italy’s most north-western region. Hemmed on three sides by a razor ridge, with the Swiss and French Alps to the north and west, and Liguria to the south, it is these isolating yet incubating barriers that make the region an anomaly. Piedmont is a cradle and at the heart of it are the hills and valleys called the Langhe, the terroir of Italy’s most nuanced wines (think Barolo, Barbaresco).
It’s where you’ll find Italy’s gastronomic holy grail, home to some of the country’s finest osterias, and the region’s legendary white truffles.
It is also the place where I had my coming of age. In the early 2000s, post-high school, I moved from Brisbane to Sydney and bounced around working in cafés. From there I fell into helping out on photo shoots for magazines (including this one). Magazines were something I had collected as a teen and it was through their pages I travelled the world. It was on one of those shoots that a couple of chefs talked about a “university of food and wine” that had just opened in Italy. A Google search revealed it to be at a castle in Piedmont, set among rolling hills cross-hatched with vineyards. With little to lose, I wrote to the faculty and applied for a scholarship. By a miracle a few weeks later, I was living in the charming town of Bra, embarking on a degree in Gastronomic Science.
When I first moved to Piedmont, it was not on the traveller’s map as it is now. Turin, its capital, was considered to be a kind of European Detroit, and the region itself lacked the postcard familiarity of Italy’s centre, the sophistication of the north, and the sun-soaked chaos of the south. It was an unusual dichotomy of faded regal elegance and industry. But it was also the home of a storied food culture, albeit one that remained enigmatic, and nowhere more so than the Langhe.
Even entering the region before the roads wind into the hills, there is a kind of foreboding talisman of its insulated nature: a bombed-out bridge from the Savoy era with arched gateways on either side, and a ghost of a crossing over the Tenero River.
Bra is often referred to as the Gateway of the Langhe. It’s the kind of town that has a raw-milk vending machine, and it’s no surprise that it is at the centre of the Slow Food movement. It felt like I was living at the edge of a gastronomically enchanted forest.
It was there that I spent weekends exploring. Prying open the doors of cantinas whose structured Barolos are so sought after and their winemaking secrets so secret that they had little interest in tourists, especially students. Ticking off a list of family-run restaurants who each had a take on regional pastas such as yolk-enriched tajarin, agnolotti del plin (a meat-stuffed bundle) or gnocchi al Castelmagno with a sauce like besciamella but made solely of the rare, cave-ripened blue cheese.
We’d shop at markets for regional oddities like hunchback cardoons, the conical-shaped peperone di Carmagnola, blond onions or bizarre red celery. In every local town, we’d visit butchers, each with different specialities of sausages and cuts: beef from the Piedmontese cattle, rare chicken breeds. Here, they indulge in serious offal, everything from the cockscomb in the challenging finanzeria to the raw meat dishes that make steak tartare seem pedestrian.
Mornings were spent in cafés with bicerin, a traditional drink from Turin made of chocolate, coffee and cream. Then there are the pasticcerie making all manner of delicate pastries, a legacy from the French regal times. Almost everything sweet comes from the almond, cherry, walnut and hazelnut groves that hem the local vineyards. Marron glacé, and gianduja, the heavenly union of hazelnut and chocolate, both hail from here.
And finally, come autumn, there’s the fun of hunting one of nature’s joys, tartufo bianco, the white truffle. It’s the perfect metaphor for the region: elusive and enchanting, coveted and elegant yet inherently earthy. Something that needs to be experienced in situ. The hunt began for me in the Langhe, and the taste will never leave my mouth.
The white truffle is the perfect metaphor for the region: elusive and enchanting, coveted and elegant yet inherently earthy.