Grape & Grain | Wine writer gets her groove back on trip to Turin, where love affair with the grape began

Anybody who’s studied something for long enough can likely empathise with my conundrum. No matter how much love you have for a subject at the start, by the time you are several years in, the topic – however sexy – has lost its lustre.

The difference between wine and, say, etymology, is that for many people, especially those outside the wine world, the topic remains fairly juicy. Thus your sullen reticence, or tacked-on grimace, when called upon to discuss this thing you love seems totally inexplicable.

I was, I admit, burned out when it came to wine at the start of this summer. After the initial euphoria of having survived my Master of Wine exams without a computer crash or nervous breakdown, my interest in ever regarding fermented grape juice as anything beyond a tasty beverage had shrivelled like cabernet grapes in a heatwave.

That this attitude was sadly at odds with my career and lifestyle did little to extract me from my malaise. Fortunately for my livelihood if not my liver, my July travels seem to have granted my withered oenophilia a new lease on life.

The foundation of any great love story is the improbably serendipitous “meet-cute.” This romance starts many years ago in Turin, capital of Piedmont in northwestern Italy, where I was a kitchen hand during a gap term, and first encountered nebbiolo, the genius grape behind Barolo and Barbaresco. It was the first place I felt deeply happy in years.

I chose Turin not so much through careful research into Italy’s regional culinary traditions, but because of a colourful New York Times article on Turin’s famed gianduja (the chocolate and hazelnut paste that Nutella – much more cheaply – is based on) that coincided with a breathless parental travel missive extolling Turin’s splendours. “Cool, dad,” I responded, “wanna help me find a job there?” He did: at a restaurant called Boja Fauss, loosely translatable as “wtf?”

Months beforehand, at a Manhattan cocktail party, I’d bumped shoulders with the owner of a boutique Italian wine importer whose European HQ happened to be Turin. Serendipity indeed. I managed to insinuate myself into a trip for their salespeople in Piedmont and neighbouring Valle D’Aosta, emerging 1,000 per cent sold on the concept of a life in wine.