Gianni Doglia
Appellation: Asti
Proprietor: Doglia family
Year Founded: 1947
Size: 16 hectares
Farming Practice: Organic
La Vita Effervescente
Gianni Doglia made his mark with next-level Moscato d’Asti, but his joyful approach to winemaking has bubbled over into a wild mix of Piedmont varietals.
“I was born in a barrel.”
That’s how the irrepressible Gianni Doglia explains the ebullient wines he’s been making in Asti for the last two decades. He doesn’t blame his parents. He credits his Grampa Genio, a onetime sharecropper who saved up to buy a piece of land in his native Castagnole delle Lanze in 1947.
In those days the chestnut forests and hazel stands thrummed with badgers and hedgehogs while woodpeckers hammered away at birch boughs overhead, and nightfall belonged to the bats. Eugenio Rivella cultivated grapes, aided by his youngest daughter Marisa, a jane-of-all-trades whose stubborn optimism became the soul of the enterprise. Gianni inherited his mother’s sense of boundless possibilities, and as he began studying enology and tasting wines, he realized that his childhood stomping grounds were “a truly unique territory.”
Soon after joining his parents at the helm in 2000, he set about trying to produce a truly unique wine—chasing an idea that verged on an oxymoron: a Moscato d’Asti built to age. “Few believed in it,” Gianni recalls, but by applying a long Charmat method to fruit from the family’s oldest Moscato d’Asti vineyard—the Casa di Bianca—he obtained a wine as elegant as it was sweetly effervescent, with an aromatic intensity that surprised even him. Left to refine in the bottle for a few years, notes of saffron, nettle and mint emerged from a backdrop of exotic yellow fruit. It was joy in a glass, upending the expectations of Italians up and down the boot to all but create a category of its own.
Something of the same spirit animates every one of Doglia’s cuvées—which range from Piedmont’s flagship varietals to enticing obscurities like Ruchè, a black-skinned grape that was essentially saved from extinction by a parish priest who worked out how to make dry wine from it in the 1960s. Gianni leans into its wild florality and blackberry tang to produce a full-bodied red that shimmers with sprightly energy.
Doglia’s 17 hilly hectares lie in what he calls a “middle land” between Langa and Monferrato. This is the kind of wine country where you can still see owls swoop down from oak trees and watch foxes prowl for hares. Doglia’s predominantly calcareous and clayey vineyards, studded with robin and sparrow nests, belong to a vibrant and varied landscape. (The estate’s hazelnuts, incidentally, are among the richest you’ll ever taste.) “And this location is strongly reflected in our wines,” Gianni says. “They have intense aromas, a structure that’s not overly opulent, but they have incredible verticality.” Those are the qualities he seeks to reinforce in the cellar, pursuing equilibrium and elegance via short maceration times and native yeasts, while forswearing filtration and clarification.
It’s that delicate touch, as much as his meticulous approach to sustainable agriculture, that earned Gianni recognition as Gambero Rosso’s 2022 Grower of the Year. Whether you call it minimal-intervention vinification or an old-fashioned insistence on food-friendly wine, Doglia conveys each of its diverse varietals with an immediacy and directness that seems to collapse the distance between the berry and the bottle.
Stainless-steel fermentation channels the Monferrato Nebbiolo’s clean fruit into sleek symmetry with long-lingering forest scents and silk-soft tannins. The open-knit, enveloping Barberas have a juicy freshness that reflects Gianni’s puckish suggestion that the varietal can be regarded as a “white wine disguised as a red,” if you let its emblematic acidity lead the way. And though no one will mistake the Bosco Donne Barbera’s bright fruit for anything other than the deep-ruby expression of 50-year-old vines, Doglia’s Grignolino may inspire genuine—and delighted—doubt. After a two- to three-day maceration, this red-skinned Piedmont specialty is finished “in bianco,” emerging from cold fermentation wrapped in aperitivo aromas of geraniums and orange peel to go with a back-palate bitterness that begs another sip. Meanwhile Gianni’s zippy Cortese—an orchard in a glass—shows his facility with proper dry whites.
It’s no wonder that the kind-hearted, fifty-something winemaker has become a bit of a north star for a younger generation of Italian vignerons. His environmental consciousness connects directly with the freshness and vigor that burst from his bottles—which, like Gianni, are unpretentious and just plain fun.
“A wine is like a child,” he says. “It undoubtedly resembles the producer who wants to enhance the characteristics they like the most.” For him and his sister Paola—who joined him in 2013—good cheer and spontaneity rank high.
But what’s truly indispensable—as Gianni emphasizes—is to have been born to wily, nimble contadini who knew the value of what they had: a truly unique territory from which a joyous spirit might take flight.
Certainly, it comes from the land and our zest for life! A wine is like a child, and it undoubtedly resembles the producer who wants to enhance the characteristics they like the most.
Wines:
Varietal/Blend: White Muscat
Vineyard Area: From three separate plots near the winery in village of Anunziata within the greater commune of Castagnole delle Lanze
Soil: Calcareous and limestone-rich
Elevation: 300 meters
Vine Training Method: Guyot
Vinification: Harvested manually in the vineyard and led with care in boxes to the winery; here they are pressed gently and the must obtained is preserved in cooling vats (-1,5° C) until it is time to vinify it in the autoclave. The fermentation takes place at a controlled temperature and with the help of selected yeasts until it reaches 5% alcohol.
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: White Muscat
Vineyard Area: From a small plot next to the winery in the village of Anunziata called “Casa di Bianca”
Soil: Calcareous and limestone-rich
Elevation: 300 meters
Vine Training Method: Guyot
Vinification: Manual harvest, gently pressed and elaborated in the Martinotti Method in autoclave, where it rests on yeast for at least six months.
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Cortese
Soil: Calcareous clay marl with a presence of silt
Elevation: 300 meters
Exposure: Varying south-facing
Farming Practice: Manual harvest, de-stemmed and gently pressed
Vinification: After racking the malolactic fermentation will take place in stainless steel tanks where the wine finishes its maturation (6 months)
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Grignolino
Vineyard Area: From two plots in the village of Anunziata within the greater commune of Castagnole delle Lanze
Soil: Calcareous clay-limestone
Elevation: 300 meters
Vine Training Method: Guyot
Vinification: The grapes are harvested manually in the vineyard and are lled with care in cassettes for the transportation to the winery. They are then pressed and fermented at a controlled temperature of approximately 18° C with a maceration of approximately 2 / 3 days with frequent pumping over. Subsequently the Grignolino is drawn o and the fermentation is nished “in white”, meaning without the skins and pips, always maintaining a temperature of 18° C. At the end of the fermentation process, the wine is left to clarify with static decantation until the end of winter.
Maturation: It remains in stainless steel until spring when it’s bottled.
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Barbera
Vineyard Area: From two separate parcels in the village of Anunziata within the greater commune of Castagnole delle Lanze
Soil: Calcareous clay-limestone
Elevation: 300 meters
Vine Training Method: Guyot
Vinification: The grapes are harvested manually in the vineyard and led with care in cassettes to the winery, pressed and then fermented at a controlled temperature with a maceration of approximately 8 – 10 days. At the end of the fermentation process, the wine is left to clarify with static decantation until the end of winter.
Maturation: It remains in stainless steel vats until spring when it will be bottled.
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Barbera
Vineyard Area: From a single plot of 50-year-old vines surrounded by forest on the northern end of the village of Anunziata within the greater commune of Castagnole delle Lanze
Soil: Calcareous clay-limestone
Elevation: 300 meters
Vine Training Method: Guyot
Vinification: The grapes are harvested manually in the vineyard and are led with care in cassettes to the winery, pressed and then fermented at a controlled temperature with a maceration of approximately 8 days. At the end of the fermentation process, the wine is left to clarify with static decantation until the end of winter.
Maturation: It remains in stainless steel vats until the end of summer when it’s bottled.
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Ruché
Vineyard Area: From a small plot in the commune of Castagnole Monferrato north of Doglia's home village of Anunziata
Soil: Calcareous clay-limestone
Elevation: 200 meters
Vine Training Method: Guyot
Vinification: The grapes are harvested manually in the vineyard and carefully stored in little baskets and transport to the winery, crushed and fermented at a controlled temperature with a maceration of about 10-12 days.
Maturation: At the end of fermentation, the wine is left without filtering by static settling in stainless steel until the end of the winter.
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Nebbiolo
Vineyard Area: From two adjacent plots of Nebbiolo vines around the winery in the village of Anunziata within the greater commune of Castagnole delle Lanze
Soil: Calcareous clay-limestone
Elevation: 300 meters
Vine Training Method: Guyot
Vinification: Manual harvest, de-stemmed and maceration with skin contact and soft pump-overs
Maturation: After racking the malolactic fermentation will take place in stainless steel tanks where the wine finishes its maturation (6 months)