Why it matters
The producer
Amalia and Sandro spent years looking through the hills around Dogliani before they found what they wanted: an eight-hectare farm on the San Luigi hills, a few kilometres outside the town, with a stone farmhouse and vineyards that had sat empty for more than three decades. They bought it in 2001 and began restoring it the following year.
What they inherited alongside the house was already worth keeping. The previous farmers told them the Dolcetto vines had been planted immediately after the Second World War and yielded small crops of high-quality grapes. Amalia and Sandro reorganised the parcels rather than replanting and built the estate around those old vines. Organic certification came in 2005, three years after they applied.
Place and vineyards
Where the wines begin
Dogliani is a town and appellation in the Langhe hills of Cuneo province, southern Piemonte. The Dogliani DOC and Dogliani Superiore DOCG are both built around Dolcetto, a dark-skinned grape that produces wines of vivid colour, firm tannin and bitter-edged fruit in this particular corner of Piemonte. The hills around the town grow Dolcetto at its most characterful: lower yields, darker extraction, more grip than the Dolcetto bottlings produced further north across the Langhe.
The San Luigi hills sit a few kilometres outside Dogliani itself. At this address the vines face a range of aspects and the terrain is hilly enough that individual parcels accumulate very different amounts of sunlight and drainage across a season. The estate's address places it in the heart of this Dolcetto country, though the range now extends well beyond the original appellation.
In the cellar
Vineyards and cellar
All grapes are picked by hand. No commercial yeasts are added to any fermentation: the wines rely on the native yeast populations present on the grapes and in the cellar. After fermentation, the wines are neither filtered nor clarified, which leaves more of the grape's natural sediment and protein in the bottle and gives the wines a textural weight that filtration would remove. Sulphur additions are kept to a minimum.
The Langhe Nebbiolo is selected from multiple vineyards and aged in large oak casks for thirteen to eighteen months, followed by further bottle ageing before release. Large casks impart less new-oak character than barriques and allow slow oxidation; the wine takes on depth without acquiring a dominant wood flavour.
Wines to know
The range in view
Dolcetto supplies the historical core. The Dogliani DOC and Dogliani Superiore Pirochetta are made from the post-war parcels, old vines grown without chemicals and picked at natural ripeness. Dogliani Superiore is the higher-grade appellation, requiring longer ageing; Pirochetta is the estate's top Dolcetto bottling. The amphora Dogliani Superiore Pirochetta takes the same fruit into terracotta, producing a wine with earthier texture and a longer, more complex finish than the conventional version.
The Langhe Nebbiolo is built from multiple vineyard selections across the estate and neighbouring plots, aged in large oak casks for thirteen to eighteen months. It is a structured red wine with firm tannin, dried-cherry and iron-edged fruit, and the mid-palate weight that cask ageing adds. The amphora Langhe Nebbiolo is made without cask ageing, which brings the grape's tannin and acidity forward without the softening influence of wood.
A useful way in
A bottle to begin with
Start with the Langhe Nebbiolo. It draws together everything the estate does: multiple-vineyard selection from organically farmed parcels, large-cask ageing over thirteen to eighteen months, no filtration, no added yeast. In the glass it shows dried cherry, iron and rose, with a firm acid line, medium-full body, and a dry tannic finish. The no-filtration approach leaves a slight haze and adds to the wine's mouthfeel. This is Piemontese Nebbiolo made with full conviction and minimal intervention, and it explains both the cellar philosophy and the estate's ambitions more directly than any other single bottle in the range.