Notes from The Source:

"Boca sits on the east side (left bank) of the Sesia and is shared between the communes Grignasco, Boca, and Prato Sesia. Most of the vineyards are tucked further back into the mountains away from the Sesia and experience a slightly cooler influence from the Alps. While many of the important local appellations mostly sit between 250-350 meters of altitude, with some up to 400, most of Carlone’s vineyards face south and range between 380-450 meters. Like many vineyards in the area, outside of important appellations like Gattinara and Ghemme, his vineyards are largely surrounded by forest and in constant contact with fresh alpine winds, making for wines with great tension and strong array of more savory characteristics rather than punchy fruit.

In Carlone’s Boca vineyards, and in the neighboring appellations, Gattinara and Bramaterra, these porphyry rocks are more specifically known as rhyolitic ignimbrites: rocks left over after a volcano’s pyroclastic flows—a volcanic current that contains lava, ash, and gases. They have similar mineral makeup of the well-known, non-volcanic igneous rock, granite. Carlone’s vineyards have little to no influence from other formations or depositions, which means the vineyard topsoil is eroded from the underlying bedrock, making it a purely volcanic rock terroir. These rhyolitic ignimbrites are extremely acidic rocks with a high metal content. This presents a natural challenge for volume production due to metal toxicity that often makes flowering more difficult, and without flowers there is no fruit.

The main game at Carlone is Boca. A spice rack of different Nebbiolo biotypes (minimum of 85% at Carlone) and Vespolina, both go through spontaneous fermentations on the skins (fully destemmed) for around a month for the Nebbiolo, and the Vespolina for 14-18 days. After pressing, the wine is aged in 25hl Slovenian oak botti for eighteen months and then prepared for bottling. The first Boca wine is released no sooner than three years after the vintage date. The different biotypes from all over Piemonte give this wine a great breadth of complexity, allowing it to hit a broad chromatic range of octaves from tenor to baritone to bass, all in wonderful harmony. However, the biotypes with bigger structure (mostly from the south, in Langhe) are reserved for this wine.

There are some ancient-vine grapes (older than eighty years, with some more than a hundred) that go into his production. Most are younger in his newly planted vineyards, and he uses numerous regional biotypes, all of which are lab “certified” as resistant against flavescence dorée (FD), a vine disease transported by leafhoppers with no known cure outside of a vine’s natural resistance. FD most often kills younger vines and if it doesn’t kill older vines, it severely reduces their productivity. (Read more about FD here.) None of the newly planted vines are considered true massale selections in the traditional sense. Without “certification” of plant material in a lab, most massale selections simply will not make it with FD present. Davide’s answer to this is to find strong vines with a natural resistance and send them to a lab for testing. If they prove resistant, they are cloned from there and planted in his vineyards—so, a massale of sorts, but not precisely."