La Scolca

La Scolca is the estate that made Gavi famous. The Soldati family bought the abandoned property at Rovereto di Gavi in 1919 and replanted it, and in 1919 the region was making sweet and sparkling wine from Cortese rather than the dry white it is now known for.

The change came from Vittorio Soldati, who in the 1950s decided the grape deserved to be made dry, still and seriously. He was right, and Gavi became one of the first Italian whites to be taken seriously abroad. The Black Label, first released in 1961, is the wine that carried the region's reputation into restaurants across Europe.

The vineyards sit on white marl in the hills of south-east Piedmont, close enough to the Ligurian coast for Gavi always to have been drunk with the seafood of Genoa. Cortese is naturally high in acidity and restrained in aroma, which makes it a precise, mineral wine rather than a showy one, and unusually for an Italian white it can age for a decade or more.