Tag Archives: pollenzo

Historical Wine Cellars in Piedmont

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At the Wine Bank: a map of Italy’s most important varietals and their regions

The Piemonte region is an area in northwestern Italy, bordering France and Switzerland, with distinct seasons and mountainous terrain (literally: “foot of the mountain”). It is considered one of the greatest winemaking regions in Italy, renowned for its Barolo and Barbaresco red wines made from Nebbiolo grapes.

For the first day of the Piedmont stage, we stopped by the Banca del Vino (wine bank) housed inside the Agenzia di Pollenzo, which is also home to (you guessed it) the University of Gastronomic Sciences. Ah, familiar stomping grounds. Inspired by a vision from Carlo Petrini, the Banca del Vino is an effort to build a historical record of Italian wines, to select, stock and maintain the best of the Italian peninsula. Thus, the vault is part storage cellar, part museum, and holds a collection of wines from over 300 producers across Italy while providing tastings for visitors. They also offer themed workshops if you are interested in researching one region or varietal in particular. Outside of the vault, a large number of wines line the shelves and are available for sale. I was amused to see one labeled “Cornell,” although additional research suggests that the wine has nothing to do with my alma mater or Ezra Cornell’s descendants.
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Back Roads of the Italian Countryside, or My Daily Commute

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Note: This post is mostly geared towards UNISG students, so it will be fairly useless to you unless you need to get from Bra to Pollenzo.

Living in Italy, you start to realize that there are always two ways of doing everything, the official system and the back door in-the-know route. Take the process of acquiring a permesso di soggiorno residency permit, required for all non-EU citizens staying in Italy for over 90 days. In Bra, you can either go to the Post Office, pick up an application kit and struggle to figure out what to put down so as to not have your application rejected, or you can go to the Al Elka-L’incontro center for foreign citizens, which provides consulting services and staff who fill out the application for you. Granted, the center is only open for 7 hours a week, on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings, but that is different gripe. Ah, Europe.

Similarly, there are many ways to get from my apartment in Bra to UNISG campus in Pollenzo. There is a bus available and one of my flatmates has a car, but I have opted to make use of my bicycle and bike to class daily. This has led to some scary, ahem, entertaining rides to class, since intercity Italian roads strongly favor wide trucks and no shoulders. And so, I set out to find an alternate route to school besides the one suggested by Google Maps, and began exploring the back roads between Bra and Pollenzo. After a week of exploration, I had discovered a number of small dirt-lined roads, some of which were unpaved and lined with gravel (e.g. a bike flat waiting to happen), others which were just as crowded with traffic as my original route. Then Laura, one of my classmates, told me that she had learned the perfect route to get to campus from an undergrad student. Free of traffic and thoroughly paved? I jumped to follow her.
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