Who is Ottavio Rube?

In today's wine review article, there is a throwaway reference to Ottavio Rube. But I'm sure your editor isn't the only one who is less than assured that he could pick out Signor Rube on the top deck of a number 47 bus. A quick Google name-check came up with an interview in Italian: not particularly revelatory if your linguistic capabilities were less successful in crossing the Alps than Hannibal's elephants. But help is at hand, thanks to the Autumn 2010 (launch) issue of the carafe (the quarterly newsletter from Aubert and Mascoli), from whose article we have drawn the following quick guide.

Ottavio Rube (right)

• collaborated with Cesare Berutti and Enrico Boveri to set up Valli Unite in 1977 in opposition to intensive and specialised farming.
• is part of a family wine business in the region that dates from 1382.
• has seen Valli Unite grow into a self-sufficient, interdependent community of 30 farmers mixing animal and arable farming of all sorts.
• eschews the use of exotic yeasts to introduce flavours artificial to the area, and rejects the use of barriques to disguise and homogenise flavours. Instead, his aim is to have every vintage as a pure expression of the region and the season.
• says “Wine should express many time spans: the millions of years of geology, the shorter cycle of botanical layering, the millennary cycle of human intervention, and finally the climatic tribulations of the year.”

Truly, a man whose philosophy is not a million kilometres from that of QED.