Spring...with a wintry sting
Piedmont, for those who do know it, is rightly famous for its glorious autumns. Mists in the hollows of the picture book hills, topped by ancient villages and towns. The smells of woodsmoke, the ‘terra’ and of course, mushrooms and truffles. And from our personal experience of recent years, autumn can be a thoroughly reliable season weather wise – often very mild.
Spring can be reliable too: reliably unpredictable and extreme in terms of weather that is. Winter’s tail can unexpectedly curl around those early weeks of March, even into early April, and give you a bit of a shock – especially for us gardeners if we’ve planted out anything tender. The temperatures can see-saw, minuses up to late teens. The primroses burst into bloom along with wild violets, valiantly trying to convince that warmer sunshine is around the corner, but we’ve learned to be cautious. And whilst March can be the bearer of these last touches of winter weather, with April comes the winds which seem to herald in the change of seasons, almost as if nature wants to blow winter back to where it came from.
The April winds are also a reminder of the what feels like handbrake-turn changes in the local weather. The jump from Autumn into Winter, and Winter into Spring can feel quite sudden.. ‘Verdant’ is not a word I often find myself reaching for, but it really is the only description of what happens to the fields and vegetation at the first hint of warmth. The greys and intense browns of winter, especially in the woodlands, give way to fields that quite literally spring into life. The only real hint the season is about to arrive are the ‘helleborus foetidus’ which grow randomly and wild, especially in the woodlands, and which surrounded by the almost uniform browns and dark colours of winter, light up like glow worms, luminescent green. They are followed by wild, tiny and delicate purple violets and, of course, primroses, with their gorgeous buttery yellow blooms. Short lived, but always glorious. By late March our many forsythia plants have finally flourished with their blazes of yellow and all at once, these early signs of warmth and new beginnings have you thinking of summer parties and a cool glass of alta langa in the sun.
The especially vibrant herald of Spring can also be found in the plains around Vercelli and fields below Turin in the north of the region, where against the backdrop of the snow-covered Alps, paddy fields and huge expanses of wheat burst into shoots. This green, when the sun catches it, is almost cartoon-luminous, creating a truly magical foreground to the still icy mountains. Suddenly, these early signs of warmth and new beginnings have you thinking of sorting the garden out, introducing new plants and getting that organic matter dug in, possibly the first aperitivo evening you might be able to have ‘sul terrazzo’, as the fruit trees and robinias (Black Locust as their known here) start to flower. It’s the only time robinias of the wild variety that grow around Piedmont come into their own for three or four weeks, filling the air with a heady honey bubble-gum scent. The rest of the year, as any gardener will tell you, they are the devil: viciously spiny, poisonous, rampant in their spreading habitat, both via seed and runner, and a destroyer of other trees – they grow faster than anything else and deprive everything of light, water and nutrients.
Being honest, Steve and I tend to think of May as the beginning of summer, rather than the end of spring. The temperatures begin to climb pleasantly into the early twenties and whilst this is absolutely because it does start to suddenly warm up, it’s also probably a throwback to our life in the UK when, as a month for planning anything weather-dependent, May was simply less reliable. Back then, early twenties in temperature was summer! Here in Piedmont sure there can still be some rain and chilly May days, but they’re rare. In our books its already tipped into summer, and shorts – much to the bemusement of many of our Italian neighbours - make their first appearance of the year.
There is almost as much happening in spring in the region, in terms of food and wine events, as in the autumn months. Spring can, perhaps surprisingly, be a good time to visit a vineyard too. It’s quieter and there are more opportunities to chat to the staff about what is going to be good for the year and what kind of new vintages are coming online. The annual Vinium (April) and Nizza Barbera (May) events are certainly two sets of dates marked in bold on our calendar, and are easy ways to again get into the swing of discovering new producers and reacquainting ourselves with old favourites.
Spring for us also means we’ll be busy in our own garden as well as that of Villa Menaluna: clearing the debris of winter, finalising this season’s’ planned projects, attending to the myriad of new jobs that the harsh impact of the colder months has now demanded is a priority, and of course, battling to prepare the garden and our hillsides before these awaken from their seasonal slumber. For once they do, we’re racing to stay ahead of the weeds once again.
Further Info:
Vinium Alba: https://www.vinumalba.com/en/
Nizza é Barbera: https://enotecanizza.it/eventi/nizza-e-barbera/
As a guest of Villa Menaluna, this information and much more for many other events is available to you in our digital guide book, which you can access from the moment you’ve made your reservation.