The charm of Piemonte’s outlier wine

Tucked into the southeastern crevice of Piemonte, Gavi denotes the area that surrounds and is named for the town of Gavi.

Wines carrying the Gavi label are made from 100 percent cortese, a white varietal whose name in Italian means polite, courteous.

It’s a fitting moniker for a grape that yields wines that are both steadfast and pleasing, highly sippable in their own right but also food friendly.

Gavi, as region and as a wine, has a Mediterranean bent that stands in contrast with the Alpine heartiness to the rest of Piemonte.

Whereas fog (nebbia) blankets the vineyards at harvest in and around Barolo and Barbaresco – and gives name to Piemonte’s most prestigious varietal, nebbiolo – it’s sea breezes off the Ligurian that cross over the Appennino and waft over Gavi.

Earthy delicacies like hazelnuts and truffle are the stuff of food festivals and what first comes to mind as signatures of Piemonte to match with the region’s luscious red wines. It’s fresh fish dishes, however, that headline the menu pairings with Gavi, underscoring its proximity to Liguria.

“It’s Piemonte, but it’s 55 kilometers from the sea,” observes Angelo, standing in greeting from the lookout point on the terrace of La Scolca, on the pulse from the Italian Riviera felt in Gavi.   

Angelo, going on 14 years with La Scolca on the day of our tour and tasting, was drawn to the family owned and operated vineyard and winery because it meant he would be working with bosses who “live the job.”

Angelo originally interviewed for an accountant position after hearing about an opening at La Scolca. He brought an impressive language skill set, including French, English, and a smattering of German and Spanish, for navigating export markets.

It was the family’s idea to take Angelo out of accounting and make him more directly involved in the winemaking. He leads with the warmth and grace of a family member and the knowledge of someone in tune with all aspects of the operation.  

La Scolca is currently jointly led by Giorgio Soldati and his daughter Chiara as the fourth and fifth generations at the helm.

The winemaking philosophy at La Scolca is to vinify by the age of the vines, with those reaching 35 to 40 years old considered as starting to arrive at full maturity and intensity. Some vines are 70 years old.

There are 50 hectares of cortese at the La Scolca estate, which also includes the 16-century villa that houses the winery, and was purchased by the Soldati family between 1917 and 1919.

At the time of purchase, the land at La Scolca was mostly forest, with some plots dedicated to grain.

In replanting La Scolca as a vineyard, the Soldati family chose cortese, rather than red varietals, which were more traditional.

The first La Scolca harvests were primarily sold to Cinzano for its production of spumante, literally “foaming,” Italy’s popular fizz.

Gavi as source of cortese to shore up production of spumante in nearby Asti had become the region’s MO by the mid 20th century.

Credit for distinguishing Gavi as a wine region of note is largely handed to Vittorio Soldati for his work at La Scola in the 1950s to make a dry, still wine from cortese.

Fully embracing the role of innovator, Vittorio named the new wines coming from La Scolca as Gavi dei Gavi ­– the Gavi of Gavi.

By the 1960s, on the heels of other producers following La Scola’s example, Gavi arose as the premier white wine of Italy.

Gavi held its status into the 1970s, but it started to dim in the 1980s.

As Karen MacNeil describes in The Wine Bible (2001), Gavi was unseated when palates started favoring the white wines coming out of Friuli, a small pocket in Italy’s far northeastern corner.

Today, Gavi today straddles interesting spheres.

Most wine critics come short of giving the type of high accolades Gavi enjoyed during its heyday, but neither do they entirely dismiss it.

There is something of an under-the-radar stealth to Gavi, as it pops up on lists as an obscure find or in such articles as New York Times critic Eric Asimov’s “10 Great Bottles of Italian White Wine Under $25” (May 21, 2020).

At the same time, however, Gavi lacks the edginess or disruptor status of, say, orange wines, which has cultivated a growing niche of wine drinkers. Sales for orange wine – white wines made with extended skin contact that deepens the hue of the wine – increased by 27 percent in the first half of 2020 compared with 2019 and 2018.

The challenge of just what to make of Gavi likely stems from the characteristics of cortese.

To Oak or Not to Oak?

A white wine wheel by Wine Folly lists cortese in the “Light and Zesty” category alongside such typically crisp varietals as albariño and dry chenin blanc.

The general modern consensus seems to settle on Gavi as reaching its best when the wine doesn’t try to outdo itself but retains an acidity and freshness that remains complementary to fish.  

This assessment echoes some of the sentiment when enthusiasm for Gavi, particularly outside Italy, started to ebb.

As Burton Anderson recounts in The Wine Atlas of Italy: A traveller’s guide to the vineyards (1990), Gavi seemed to stumble as producers began aging their wines in oak.

Anderson ascribes the choice of oak as potentially an attempt to mirror what was perceived as the direction of international tastes.

The oak trend Anderson references is likely the surge in popularity for Californian chardonnay that grew out of the 1976 Academie du Vin tasting in Paris, where the 1973 Chateau Montelena of Napa Valley topped its Burgundy competitors.

In the years following the 1976 tasting, Californian chardonnay became synonymous with oak, much to its own detriment.

Though it would take until 1994 for chardonnay to become the top-selling varietal in California, by at least 1995 there was already a refrain of A.B.C. (Anything But Chardonnay). It was a chafe against the ubiquitousness of the wine and a rebuff of the super-oaked style growing in fashion.

These days, big-oak chardonnays are about as en vogue as shoulder pads, and the rise of the A.B.C. crowd is case in point that there can be too much of a good thing. The ultimate conclusion that oak was a misfit for cortese shows that what enhances one varietal doesn’t necessarily suit another.

While oak became a wine flashpoint late in the 20th century, it’s been a part of winemaking going back to the Roman Empire, evolving mostly out of practical reasons.

Readily available in Europe’s forests, oak offered the advantages of being pliable, durable, and leakproof in making barrels to store and transport wine. The effects oak added to the wine were a perk discovered later. 

Oak adds baking spice and vanillin flavors to wine and also influences texture by allowing for more oxygen than a stainless steel tank. How much oak affects the wine is a matter of several factors, including:

• Barrel size – the larger the barrel, the less surface area there is for the wine to be contact. The most common type in size and shape is the barrique, which originated in Bordeaux and traditionally holds 59 gallons (225 liters);
• Barrel age – the more times a barrel is used, the less intense the flavors it imparts become;
• Type of oak – French oak has less pronounced vanillin flavor compared to American oak;
• Grain density – with tighter-grained oak being less porous and generally leading to a more gradual, mellow integration of the oak flavors; and
• Stave “toast” – how lightly or heavily the staves are torched, releasing natural sugars within the wood for a caramelization, when the staves are being fired at the cooperage to bend into the shape of the barrel.

Whether a wine is fermented or aged in oak also makes a difference. During fermentation, the active yeast cells will also interact with the wood, diminishing the overall effect on the wine. A wine aged in oak after fermentation will be on its own to fully absorb the exposure.

Cortese Controversy

What makes chardonnay amenable to oak is the fact that the varietal lacks strong flavor on its own, providing something of a blank canvas to winemakers.

Oddly enough, this very trait of chardonnay that makes it a great partner with oak, is the very same one cited against using it with cortese.

Anderson in The Wine Atlas of Italy joins his contemporaries in thinking that cortese on its own is rather bland, with oak overwhelming the grape’s subtle perfume and dulling its soft fruit notes.

It’s perhaps these shared varietal characteristics between cortese and chardonnay that first led some early fans of Gavi to compare the wine to white Burgundy. Anderson even describes the early La Scolca vintages from the 1950s as being closer to this mark.

Whether the link was a true palate distinction or a marketing angle, it caused some sputtering. The vineyards that produce white Burgundy cover some hallowed grounds.

The connection between the two wines was made often enough, however, that Jancis Robinson brought the hammer down in her second edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine (1999).

On the Gavi entry, Robinson wrote: “comparisons to white Burgundy on the part of its most fervent admirers seem far-fetched.”

It’s 21 years since Robinson’s rebuttal and the present take on Gavi is to keep it in the same category as Chablis – still Burgundy (the northernmost part of it) and still chardonnay (just the unoaked style).

Gavi may be unlikely to exceed its current reputation as “a good fish white wine,” but that mantle belies Gavi’s charm.

It’s the wine with a Mona Lisa smile. A subtle allure that hints at more beneath the surface.