Pietro Ratti, overlooking Barolo vineyards, says Italians come to the country in the fall to reconnect with their pasts

I’m just back from a business trip to northern Italy. On the return flight I made a lengthy list of potential blog topics. Here’s the first one, which seems appropriate for Thanksgiving week. I was struck that both Italians and Germans I spoke to said they admire the American Thanksgiving holiday because it has a simple agenda of family, feasting and gratitude, not national imperatives or overt religion. In the Piedmont wine region they were in the midst of their own seasonal feasting.

Last week in Piedmont the weather turned sharply cold, icing over small streams and making me wish I had brought gloves. The leaves had mostly fallen from the hazelnut trees but still clinged to a portion of the grapevines carpeting the steep hills of Barolo and Barbaresco.

Pietro Ratti, who runs the winery that his father, Renato Ratti, founded in 1968, showed me the view from the hilltop village of La Morra. In the autumn you can identify the grape varieties by the color that their leaves turn, he said. Nebbiolo, which makes the long-lived Barolo and Barbaresco, turns a golden yellow. Barbera, which can make an impressively rich wine, too, turns orange, and Dolcetto, the lighter-weight, early drinking red wine, turns red. In California the red color means a chronic vine disease, leafroll virus, but Pietro said it’s not the case here.

View from the hilltop town of La Morra. It was spectacular in person

The harvest was over, but the area still vibrated with activity. It was the most popular time of year for visitors. In just two days I met people from Germany, the U.K., Switzerland, Singapore, Japan, California and from many parts of Italy who were visiting tasting rooms, eating fresh pasta with paper-thin slices of white truffle shaved over them, bombing around the twisting and narrow country roads in their BMWs, and buying the great wines of the region wine to take home.

I asked Pietro why this season is so popular here and he said the obvious, that the five-week-long truffle festival brings a lot of visitors, but that other forces besides the pungent and expensive fungi pull people to Piedmont. “Italians, even people in the cities, like to come to the country to reconnect with their pasts. We were all farmers once, so there’s something deep in us that wants to go back to the country, especially at this time of year.

“For Italians the fall is the season of memory,” Pietro said. He is not a slick guy, but a serious winemaker who along with his uncle took over the winery when his innovative father, Renato, died in 1988. Pietro was just 20 then. It seemed to me he was speaking from his heart and not from a master marketing plan. “In Italy food and wine are important, and they’re part of our past as well as our present. Look at all the restaurants where they still serve the traditional foods of the region, and here in the Langhe we have the best restaurants in Italy.

“Other parts of Italy have other attractions. Here you come to eat and drink, so you need to have a great wine and great food. The truffles are an extra excuse,” he said. “People think, ‘So what if they’re expensive, once a year who cares?’ ”

More on the truffles later.

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