La Ciau del Tornavento
Piazza Leopoldo Baracco 7
Treiso (Barbaresco)
Tel. +39 0173 638333
The dishes
Fried frog legs wth Piedmontese bagnet verd
Rabbit and Carmagnola peppers
Agnolotti del Plin stuffed with Seirass Inalpi ricotta cheese served in a nest of May hay
Banana split
I have told the following story to anyone who would listen over the years, so stop me if you’ve read it before: but it’s so telling of La Ciau del Tornavento’s reality that I still narrate it over and over again because it really does convey marvelously well one of this beautiful restaurant’s main selling points.
About eight years ago or so, I was doing one of my routine visits at Trimbach, the venerable estate in Ribeauvillé in Alsace that makes two of the world’s thirty or so best dry white wines (the Rieslings Clos Ste. Hune and Cuvée Frédéric Emile) while writing up the new Alsace vintages as I have been doing regularly for twenty-plus years now. During the tasting, Jean Trimbach pours me a wine and says “And now Ian, a wine that even you have never tried before”. The wine was the Riesling 390th Special Anniversary, a rare bottling that had only been released a few months prior in a limited number of bottles and that virtually nobody had much tasted. But in looking at the bottle and the wine’s name, I was sure that I had in fact tried the wine already, and was foolish enough to state that. Jean immediately shot me down saying it was impossible. I insisted that though I didn’t remember where I had had occasion to taste it, but I was pretty sure that I had in fact done so. “No, Ian it’s impossible” was the affable reply. “But I’m really pretty sure that I have” I stammered back, with Jean just smiling graciously all the while shaking his head. Anyhow, I gave up thinking about it for I still had a dozen wines staring at me just waiting to be tasted and so I returned to concentrating on the task then at hand. However, the human mind really does work in mysterious ways: and so, right smack dab in the middle of my imbibing the new vintage of the always spectacular “Freddy Emily” (Trimbach’s outstanding Riesling Cuvée that, at any other estate, would easily be the grandest wine made there) a light shone upon the darker recesses of my neuronal grey matter and the answer came to me. “At La Ciau del Tornavento!” I blurted out, startling everyone: Pierre Trimbach almost fell of his chair and looked at me as if I had gone momentarily mad, but Jean immediately understood what I meant, answering simply: “All-right then, so you have tasted it. La Ciau del Tornavento is only one of three restaurants in the world that has this wine right now”.
That’s just one of my many Ciau stories, though it remains my favourite.
La Ciau del Tornavento has long been one of the five best restaurants of the Barolo and Barbaresco area, an area that has no dearth of amazingly good restaurants (at last count, something like thirty different three-, two- and one- Michelin-starred establishments, for example); and when the discussion comes to the sheer beauty department and/or of wine cellars, La Ciau del Tornavento easily wins either the gold or silver medal in those two specific Langhe restaurant competitions as well. After all that, yes, you’d be quite correct in thinking that La Ciau del Tornavento is a pretty special place, and one of Italy’s best restaurants.
