Bruno Giacosa Spumante Extra Brut 2019 (750ml)

Bruno Giacosa, born in 1929 in the village of Neive, was the third generation of a family of Langhe wine merchants. He left school at fifteen during the Second World War to work alongside his father, walking the hills of Barolo and Barbaresco to buy grapes. Over the next seven decades he became one of the defining names in Piedmont, famed for Barbaresco and Barolo of rare purity, and since his death in 2018 his daughter Bruna has carried the house forward. Less well known is that Giacosa also made one of Italy’s most serious sparkling wines, and he looked beyond the Langhe to make it. The grapes come from partner growers around Casteggio in the Oltrepò Pavese, the hilly corner of Lombardy south of the Po that has long been Italy’s great reservoir of Pinot Noir for traditional-method sparkling wine. This Extra Brut is 100% Pinot Noir, fermented in stainless steel without malolactic fermentation to keep its natural tension. It then goes through its second fermentation in the bottle and rests about thirty months on the lees. The 2019 was disgorged in December 2022 with a very low dosage of about 3.5 grams per liter, so the fruit and the limestone-and-clay hills of the Oltrepò do the talking. Light and precise, it is a vintage sparkling wine made with the same exacting hand behind some of Piedmont’s greatest reds.