I’m trying to see the forest differently. Facing west, the forest undulates over hills. Turn north, and in the clean morning July air, I can see the Italian Alps. Despite the 2022 summer heat wave and a drought that began with a parched winter, there is still snow at the highest altitudes. Face south and the hills abruptly flatten into Po River Valley plains, strikingly verdant with irrigated rice paddies. East, a small, ordered vineyard, just a few hectares, disrupts the tangle of forest green.

I am an outsider here in Lessona, a wine denomination in the larger Alto Piemonte wine region in the northeastern reaches of Piemonte in Northern Italy. My host is a sommelier employed by one of the region’s most notable wineries. In her mind’s eye, and then in her description aloud, she traces the boundaries where the vines grew a century ago. This landscape, now obscured...

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