THE CHARM AND ALMOST MYSTERIOUS ENERGY OF OUR HILLS

Ours is a fertile and fascinating land. The small plains turn into gentle crests and then steep slopes. Ascending a little at a time one gradually comes upon a vineyard, a hamlet, an ancient castle and then perhaps, after a hairpin bend, a breathtaking panorama opens up varying through the different seasons of the year and changing its colours to offer the observer new emotions.
We’re in the Langhe, a strip of Piedmont which nature has provided with apparent tranquillity and great vital energy. The vineyards, worked with an atavistic passion, neatly cover the sorÏ and the sunny slopes of the hills take from this privileged soil the perfumes and flavours of their best wines: Barolo, Barbaresco, Nebbiolo, Moscato. But the soil of the less sunny slopes is certainly no less generous: it is there that the hazelnut trees supplying the highly esteemed Nocciola Tonda e Gentile. (sweet, round hazelnut) have found their ideal habitat.
This is a land which likes to shroud itself in mystery, handed down through the generations in enthralling stories featuring le masche, alarming country witches evoking the most hidden and imaginative part of the popular culture of Langhe folk. Le masche are the queens of frightening stories, created and modified by the imagination of common folk during the long evenings spent in front of the fire on cold winter nights. Stories which tell of inexplicable facts and sorcery.
At Sinio d’Alba every midsummer’s eve the "notte delle Masche" is celebrated, an excuse to make merry and relive one’s childhood listening to the stories of the beneandanti, the untiring witch hunters.

This land is the mother of marvellous minds like that of Pinot Gallizio "pharmacist, alchemist, archaeologist, king of the gypsies and ignoramus" (as he used to write on his business card), polyhedric and brilliant artist; or like Cesare Pavese and Beppe Fenoglio, the authors of books which have been published around the world. The Langhe are there too, in the lines of stories and verse of these two great writers, the expressions of a concrete and genuine creativity, able to describe the wonder of places, but also the originality, the determination of the local people who succeeded in moving from the "malora" [ruin] (well described by Fenoglio in the book of the same name) to a deserved wellbeing, to the culture of taste and hospitality.
The almost stubborn will of the Langhe people was well summarised by: the inhabitants of the Langa are not afraid of digging even in the dark and that’s part of the reason why our land repays them so generously.

The products grown in the Langhe are unique because they’re the result of a series of components which only come together here: fertile soil privileged by nature; clean air far from the big urban centres and therefore from sources of pollution; the right climate for vineyards and hazelnut orchards; an intelligent farming tradition, strong-willed, solidly attached to tradition but not obtuse and with an eye to the future.

All this makes the Langa an extraordinary place which with the peace it instils and the energy it transmits, inexorably attracts people to it. Almost all those who have come here, either by chance or because they’ve heard speak of it, come back willingly and not just for a good lunch or reliable purchases of wine and desserts, but for proper holidays to spend lulled by the sincere hospitality of the local people and with hundreds of opportunities to choose between days spent in close contact with nature or enriched by cultural tours.

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