Nadir’s ‘Badebec’ Rosso takes its name from local lore, the ‘Badebec’ being a monster of fearsome stature who roams the vineyards after the sun goes down. Composed of 90% Petit Rouge and 10% Fumin and Vien de Nus, ‘Badebec’ comes from the family’s oldest holdings around the towns of Gressan and Jovencan, with vines up to 100 years of age. These towns flank the south bank of the Dora Baltea river which bisects the region, and their north- and northwest-facing vineyards make ripeness a greater challenge than in the more-often-encountered vineyards on the opposite bank. The warmer 2020 vintage has injected this rendition of Badebec with a dialed up core of lusher red fruit, as well as a beautifully lifted spice character often absent in leaner historical expressions. Lovers of tension, scintillating acidity, and livewire mineral intensity will find much to appreciate here, and a wine of this character could come from nowhere else but the dramatic altitudes of the Italian Alps.
With less than a single hectare’s worth of family holdings, Nadir Cuneaz qualifies as one of Italy’s (if not all of Europe’s) tiniest domaines. His vineyard situation is not uncommon in the Val d’Aosta, the Alpine enclave whose total production is the smallest by far among all Italian winegrowing regions (less than a third of the next-lowest-producing). It’s no surprise that cooperatives still dominate here, given the scant amount of land most families own; it’s simply easier to sell fruit to the local co-op than to go through all the painstaking work required to bottle such a tiny amount of wine. However, Cuneaz would rather see his viticultural efforts through to the end — and, like many others in his region, he does this in a small room in his modest mountain home. To even call his operation a ‘winery’ is to stretch that term past its breaking point, but there’s plenty of room for the few thousand bottles of high-toned and laser-focused alpine wines that Nadir produces each year.