Feature:
8 more classic mountain high hotels in Europe
"Why not try something more local?" asked Alberto - and we thought
we were doing the right thing in asking for wine from the region.
Apparently, we had left the Aosta Valley 200m behind at the ridge. Now we were
in Piedmont, we really must try the Nebbiolo grape, and more to the point,
how about a £23 bottle of Collis Carellae?
Alberto Calaba is a man who knows his wine stuck, as he is, nearly 10,000ft up
the Italian Alps with 6,000 bottles of wine. As the owner/manager of the
Refugio, he spends a lot of time talking to people like us, people who
really fancy a night in one of Europe's highest and remote hotels.
And it was an hotel when it opened, in 1878, until the time it shut down in
1959 when Alberto's father died. It was the opening of the first of two ski
lifts to the ridge that made Alberto's family think about re-opening, when
they more conventionally called it a refuge - lacking as it does, happily,
room service, WiFi and plasma screens.
It has been open again for 14 years with Alberto at the helm, the sixth
generation of his family to run Guglielmina. And year by year, it is getting
a lot more comfortable. Even like a hotel.
"For this year, we have put on a new roof, repainted the whole building,
put heating in the rooms and we have hot water for showers," he
relates. "Although personally, I like to sleep with the heating off and
the windows open. One night it was -14C in my room." And he laughs.
This is a fabulous place, a place I have visited three times for lunch. We
stay in Champoluc (in the Aosta Valley), then ski up and down the Gressonay
Valley before taking lifts up to the ridge. Together with the Alagna valley,
it makes up the Monterosa ski fields, which is excellent for intermediates.
A short off-piste run from the Col d'Olen ridge, this year's excellent snow
makes it even easier to get to - although a lot more difficult to climb out
of through waist-high snow to the pistes.
However, the opening of a ski lift from Alagna has also meant it is simple to
ski down a blue run to a staging post of the lift, and thence back up to the
piste. There is also an off-piste black run down to Alagna.
Alberto provides slippers and a boot room for the skis, and we sat in the
wood-burner heated bar sipping hot wine and listening to his stories. On New
Year's Eve, they watched the fireworks far below in Milan and on clear days,
you can see 80 miles to mountains to the east.
A 1893 walking book, Byways of the Southern Alps, written by E J Miles, talks
of his visit to this "comfortable inn, nigh on 10,000ft, in a landscape
of enormous glaciers, from which silver torrents flow to the River Po, fimly
visible as it winds along the plains of Piedmont and Lombardy." From
the ridge, Miles could see Mont Blanc, Lake Maggiore and the "dark cone"
of Mount Viso.
The glaciers have reduced but Mont Blanc is still clearly there, as is the
views. And the comfortable inn.
The rooms are not ensuite, nor enormous, but compact, pine-clad and with
single or bunk beds. Alberto gives us the best room in the house, No 30,
with double aspect windows, one looking out to the Lombardy plain. As there
was only us two and a group of six Danes in last Wednesday, you can choose
your room (it sleeps 50).
Dinner was hearty mountain fare: onion soup that needed a knife and home-made
pasta with sage for starters. Speck, the Tyrolean salami, with potatoes and
carpaccio with pecorino cheese followed - plus blueberry tart with grappa
and sugar cubes soaked in juniper that take your head off. No danger of
vegetables up here.
NEED TO KNOW
The Refugio
Guiglielmina is busy at Christmas and New Year, and again in March and
April (it closes on Apr 25, then has a summer season from mid-June to the
end of September, before reopening for the ski season on Dec 1).
But in January and February, like the Monterosa ski terrain, it is very quiet
on weekdays, the residents of Turin two hours away making it a little busier
at weekends.
You need only take a change of undergear and toothbrush.
Prices: We paid 165 euro (about £100) for half-board - dinner, bed and
breakfast - a total that also included lunch, a gin and tonic, two glasses
of hot wine and five small bottles of water. Sadly, the decanted Collis
Carellae wine proved to be full of sediment - so Alberto knocked that off
the bill.
Getting there: Fly to Turin, hire a car and drive to Champoluc, then it's a n
hour ski/lifts to the Col d'Olen. In Champoluc, I recommend you stay at the Hotel
Monte Cervino, at Frachet, just outside town, another excellent
family-run hotel which is handily close to the best ski bar/restaurant in
The Alps, La Grange.
Can't believe you've told everyone about La Grange. The best kept secret in Italy - until now!
Emma Berry, Newmarket, UK
10000ft ? Big deal. Get to the Himalayas or Andes. That kind of altitude is where the FOOTHILLS start. And for £100 you could stay for days (Andes) or weeks (Himalayas).
Rob, Milton Keynes,