Rovettaz: the cru won back from the woods

Rovettaz is our largest cru: almost six hectares in Quart, between 600 and 700 metres, facing south and south-west. Abandoned for centuries and covered in downy oak, it was brought back to vines in the 1980s and 1990s. It gives our Petite Arvine, Torrette Supérieur, Cornalin and Fumin.

5.7 hectares of vines
600-700 m
South, south-west
Slopes up to 80%
Föhn winds

For centuries the hill was woodland: downy oaks, the oak of dry slopes. In the 1980s and 1990s years of work by the family won it back from the woods and returned it to the vine.

Today Rovettaz gives nearly all our “Vigne Rovettaz” wines. Petit Rouge lower down, Fumin on the steepest slopes, Petite Arvine; and Torrette Supérieur, a field blend decided when this part was planted: 75% Petit Rouge, 10% Cornalin, 10% Fumin, 5% Premetta, picked and made together.

In the documents

A name from the woods, and from Burgundy

According to Rudy Sandi, the name Rovettaz (Roveyrettaz, Roverettaz) almost certainly comes from the Latin Rovereta, plural of Roveretum: oak wood. Downy oaks still grow just above the vines, and in patois the upper part of the vineyard is called Rouie: rou, rô, rouvo is the Franco-Provençal name of the downy oak. Other names in the valley share the root (Rovère, Revérettaz, Rovetta), and so does Rouvray in Burgundy.

Sandi also offers a historical reading. The Aosta Valley was the only Italian Alpine land to join the kingdom of the Burgundians, while the rest of Italy became Lombard. Lombard laws, from Rothari’s edict on, protected oak woods, which fed the pigs; Burgundian ones did not. In the kingdom of Burgundy, monasteries cleared woods to plant vines, and that is how many great Burgundy crus were born.

In the mid-12th century Benedictine monks of the Cluniac abbey of Saint-Martin d’Ainay came here and were granted these lands too, then part of the fief of Quart. The vineyard was probably born in that period. The first document naming it dates from 1714 and already calls it “le crou de la Roveyrettaz”: the cru, a place known for the quality of its wine.

1377Quartune à Saint-Christophe, alla RovoyriIn the accounts of the castellany of Quart (A. Pession), one of the five vineyards of the lords of Quart lies “alla Rovoyri”, in Saint-Christophe.
5 juillet 1714Saint-Christopheune pièce de terre en pré, arbres et vignobles appelée « Le crou de la Roveyrettaz ».Archives of the parish of Saint-Christophe, document no. 21: Jean-Antoine Petitjacques sells an annuity to Abbé Jean-Baptiste Léger on a plot called “the cru of Roveyrettaz”.

Archival research by Rudy Sandi, Aosta Valley ampelographer