n any contest to choose the title "the Wine of Italy," Lessona would be certain of winning. For it was the wine with which Quintino Sella, rejecting Champagne, offered the first toast to the new government of a united country one month after the kingdom's troops broke through the walls of Rome at the Porta Pia. At that time, the Sella family had been producing Lessona wine for 269 years and the statesman's descendents still make it today.Lessona, like many other famous Piedmontese wines, such as Barolo, Barbaresco, Ghemme and Gattinara, is made from grapes of the Nebbiolo variety. The differences among those wines are not due to varietal variations, therefore, but to environment, geography and techniques of cultivation.
Lessona was first mentioned in the 12th century. The citation noted that at Vercelli there was an ancient "ruga ad vineas" or wine road, known as the Lessonasca, that extended from the town to the vineyards of Lessona. From Roman times forward, wine was transported along that route to Milan and to the warehouses of Pavia.
Wine production had reached such a level by 1380 that 25 men and 30 oxen were needed to move the share of the output due to the feudal lord of the zone to his castle of Zumiglia. At the beginning of the 19th century, Count Fantone, a member of the Royal Academy of Agriculture in Turin, cultivated Nebbiolo in the vicinity of Lessona and made a generous wine that was so successful that it was in demand on markets as distant as Britain and Belgium. Despite Lessona's centuries-old reputation, production has steadily declined so that today it is a rare and precious as well as a good wine.
