Piazza Italia: Colors, Fragrances, & Flavors

Piazza Duomo: 25th-26th-27th April 2008

Each year, “us”, the personnel from the special company of promotion for the Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Agriculture and Handicrafts from Imperia, leave our sea, to encounter a pleasant mission travelling around the world.

To consolidate our friendship with the city of Alba, we have accepted with great pleasure the invitation to participate at the 2008 edition of Vinum, by twinning our wine and gastronomy excellences with the grand display of Italian wines.

In Alba, it would be restrictive to only talk about wine and food. We want to offer visitors our most valuable and less known peculiarities: we’ll present a 360° panoramic on the city and the province of Imperia, the inland regions, where man and his work have always represented the most important and only developing machine.

This is why we have chosen a name to represent our land, “Colours, Fragrances and Flavours”, which summarizes in a simple and genuine way our mission, simple and pure just like the personalities of our people, the conservation of our values and traditions, that express themselves in the local productions.

Visitors will have the opportunity of tasting the best of our gastronomic specialities, discovering amongst other things, the secrets of the old oil mills, where the art of pressing is still applied to one of the most valuable quality of olives from all the Mediterranean area.

It will be a delight for your senses to discover the colours and smells of our flowers, famous world-wide and chosen to embellish the most important mass-media events: from the Music Festival in Sanremo, to the New Year’s Eve Concert in Vienna: The grand florist masters will be with us to create wonderful artistic flower compositions.

We will welcome visitors with our warmest, most traditional welcome, with the same attention and consideration that we pay to our guests, that each year, in an ever increasing number, choose to spend their holidays in our region, and choose from our accommodation offers, our beaches, our inland regions, to rediscover a dimension of life that is closer to what a person needs.

Piazza Mondo: Chateauneuf du Pape

Piazza Duomo: 2nd –3rd-4th May

Among the denomination of origin most renown around the world, and the most authoritative in all the south of France, Chateauneuf du Pape is the best terroir of the southern Rodano valley, a Provencal area, with a Mediterranean climate and scenery, but with northern features in its temperament and longevity of the wines produced.

It’s the homeland of the grenache (the variety of red most widespread all over the world), a land in which it best expresses itself, with a strength, vigour and depth elsewhere far away imaginable. Hardly ever made when pure, finds in the mourvedre tannic (when it matures well and dosen’t reveal to be vegetable and harsh)– its ideal companion: completes the frame, making it straighter, donating a greater balance and longevity to the wines. The other eleven vineyards consented by the production disciplinary, have a minor role in the definition of an organoleptic character, but are needed to support and improve the shades (such as syrah, which limits to give a colour and fruit).

320 are the producers that work at this denomination, with almost 14 million bottles sold each year (7% of whites, apart from some exceptions, of scarce value), and a total 3200 hectares of vineyards. The vineyards age is sensationally high (conducted to an alberello-tree) the earth is mostly clayey and nearly always covered by the famous “cailloux roulés” (round stones in abundant sizes, which remind of rugby balls), transported by Rodano and ideal to donate balance (water, thermic, minerals) to the plants.

A permanent banquet from the 2nd to 4th May will be set up in Piazza Duomo, and will host the superb interpreters from this denomination. After Borgogna, last year’s foreign guests, four impressive wine-growers from Chateauneuf-du-Pape, will inform visitors all about their production and personal experiences.

And for those that would like to learn more, an incredible four guided tastings will be animated by these producers, that for the occasion will put forward the best of their “stables” for the enthusiasts (please see calendar). An absolute honour for Vinum……the grand wine performance.