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Among a certain cadre of music fans, near-anonymity is a virtue. The tinier the fan base and the more micro-specific the genre, the better. A trio of yaks playing klezmer standards on didgeridoo? Sure, great…until they take their act on the road, that is. Then they’re money-grubbing sellouts.

It must be acknowledged that aficionados of this type exist in the wine world. In their most extreme form, they’re the ones seeking out bottles made in purely anecdotal quantities, famous winemakers’ not-for-sale homebrew projects, wines made to ancient Etruscan recipes and sold in animal bladders plugged with oiled cloth, and even the (in)famous Jamaican meat wine.

Alternatives don’t have to be that extreme, though. Part of the fun of visiting wineries is trying all the strange, experimental stuff that never makes it out of the tasting room. And for many wine geeks, especially those whose entire and somewhat soused lives are devoted to the stuff, there’s something immensely appealing about the unknown. A new grape, a new place, a new producer…that, for some (the author included) is enough to move a wine from the shelf to the shopping basket.

Of course, this sort of wide-eyed experimentation comes with a price. Most popular wines are reliable, and in fact that’s one of the reasons they’re popular. Buying blind means that one has to accept a certain failure rate. And that’s if such wines can even be found; in the absence of importers, distributors, and retailers with a similar taste for the arcane, there’s no hope of scything one’s way through the vinous terra incognita. But there’s a nice benefit, too: obscure wines don’t have the critical acclaim or ravenous consumer base that leads to ever-expanding prices. Who can pass up the chance to be hip and abstemious?

Admittedly, obscurity is in the eye of the beholder. For some, grüner veltliner (a world-class white grape from Austria) is beyond the horizon, but for those on the bleeding edge of oenophilia it’s yesterday’s news. Or, to paraphrase the old Yogi Berra line, “it’s so popular, nobody drinks it anymore.” But there are still, even in this everyone’s-a-journalist era of information overload, some wines that remain virtually unknown, even to the cognoscenti. Here are a few that don’t deserve to remain in the shadows any longer, wines to drink with – or without – those damned yaks wheezing into their didgeridoos.

The Piedmont, a region of Northwestern Italy that roughly surrounds Turin, has some very well-known wines indeed. Barbera, dolcetto, moscato, and of course the highly-reputed Barolo and Barbaresco, are celebrated around the world, and have been for a very long time. But those are all in the south. The north, closer to the snow-capped mountains that give the area its name, is very nearly a blank slate. Some may have heard of Gattinara, thanks to Travaglini’s semi-ubiquitous square bottle, but the rest of the area might as well be in Florida, as far as wine lovers are concerned.

Which brings us to Boca. It could be in Florida, just based on its name, but in fact it’s in the northeast corner of the Piedmont, just up the road from Milan’s Malpensa airport. The wines – mostly red – are made from a combination of grapes that can include nebbiolo, croatina, vespolina, and uva rara. At least, that’s what the law says. In practice, almost no one makes Boca, and what was in the 1800s a thriving wine industry is only now being resuscitated by a few dedicated producers. Chief among them is Le Piane, owned by a jolly Swiss gentleman who has resurrected old, abandoned vineyards and planted a few new ones, in a somewhat quixotic attempt to reestablish the region. These have just entered the Boston market thanks to Adonna Imports (their only other American presence is in Minnesota, which I just cannot explain; maybe they go with lutefisk), and lovers of the unique owe it to themselves to seek them out.

Boca, which is the top-of-the-line (and most expensive) red, is a structured, highly-ageable wine made from nebbiolo and vespolina, with the beautiful, floral aromatics of the former given a firm, slightly chilly edge as befits a wine made from these altitudinous vineyards. Be wary of the uncharacteristic 2003, but other vintages are immensely appealing. From the Colline Novaresi, a much larger region just south of Boca, Le Piane makes a pair of fascinating wines at a lower price. The first, called La Maggiorina, is a nebbiolo-based blend with such a striking minerality that it tastes more like a red riesling than any red grape with which I’m familiar. And the second, which simply carries the name of the winery, is one of the very few croatina-dominated wines made anywhere, and elevates that red riesling-ness to greater heights with precision, delineation, and a burst of icebox roses.

(First published in stuff@night, 2008.)