Alta Langa DOCG & The Birth of Italian Sparkling Wine
Villa del Borgo
The Town That Invented Italian Sparkling Wine — Canelli, Alta Langa and the Bubbles That Changed Everything
It Began in a Cellar Beneath Canelli
Every great story has a beginning, and the story of Italian sparkling wine begins here. Not in a grand palace or a celebrated estate, but in the underground cellars carved into the hillside beneath the streets of Canelli, in the year 1865.
Carlo Gancia was a young Piedmontese winemaker who had spent time in Champagne, studying the méthode champenoise and returning to his homeland with a quietly revolutionary idea. What the French were doing with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay on the chalky slopes of the Marne valley, he would attempt with Moscato Bianco on the clay-limestone hills of Canelli. The result, after considerable patience and no small amount of determination, was Italy’s first spumante. A wine that would go on to conquer the tables of Europe and change the course of Italian viticulture forever.
The cellars where this happened still exist beneath Canelli today. Known as the Cattedrali Sotterranee, the Underground Cathedrals, they are extraordinary spaces: vast, vaulted, carved by hand over generations into the soft tufa stone beneath the town. UNESCO recognised their cultural and historical significance in 2014, when the entire Langhe Monferrato landscape was inscribed as a World Heritage Site. Walking through them today, in the cool and the quiet, it is not difficult to understand why.
What is Alta Langa DOCG?
A century and a half after Gancia’s experiment, the Italian sparkling wine tradition of Canelli and its surrounding hills continues. But in a direction that even he might not have anticipated.
Alta Langa DOCG is one of Italy’s most exciting and least familiar appellations: a metodo classico sparkling wine produced from Pinot Nero and Chardonnay grown at altitude on the high hills above the Langhe, at elevations between 250 and 900 metres above sea level. The name means, simply, the High Langhe. And height is everything here.
The appellation was officially recognised in 2011, though the wines had been quietly in development for decades before that. The DOCG covers a vast area spanning the provinces of Asti, Cuneo and Alessandria, but its heart lies in the high hills above Canelli. The same territory that gave birth to Italian sparkling wine more than 150 years ago.
Why Altitude Changes Everything
To understand what makes Alta Langa special, it helps to understand what altitude does to a vine.
High above the valley floors, the temperature drops, the nights are cooler and the diurnal range — the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures — becomes more pronounced. This is, for the winemaker, a gift. Slower ripening means grapes that retain their natural acidity while developing complex aromatic compounds. The resulting wines have a precision, a freshness and a structural elegance that is difficult to achieve in warmer, lower-lying sites.
Pinot Nero and Chardonnay, the two permitted varieties for Alta Langa Bianco and Rosé, thrive in these conditions. They are, of course, the same varieties that produce the great wines of Champagne, and the parallel is not accidental. The soils here, a mixture of clay, limestone and sand deposited by ancient marine sediments, share something of the mineral quality that defines the great sparkling wine terroirs of the world.
The wines themselves are aged for a minimum of 30 months on the lees, 36 for the Riserva, which gives them a depth, a complexity and a fine persistent perlage that rewards both the patient producer and the attentive drinker.
Alta Langa vs Asti Spumante — Understanding the Difference
It is worth pausing here to address a question that arises naturally for anyone exploring the sparkling wines of this territory: what is the difference between Alta Langa DOCG and Asti Spumante DOCG?
The answer lies in grape variety, method and character.
Asti Spumante, along with its more delicate sibling Moscato d’Asti, is made exclusively from Moscato Bianco using the Charmat method, in which the secondary fermentation takes place in pressurised tanks. The result is a wine that is sweet, aromatic, relatively low in alcohol and immediately pleasurable: the wine of celebrations, of long Sunday lunches, of peaches and cream and the first warmth of spring.
Alta Langa is an entirely different proposition. Made by the classic method, in which secondary fermentation takes place in the bottle as in Champagne, from Pinot Nero and Chardonnay, it is dry, structured, complex and age-worthy. It asks a little more of the drinker and gives a great deal more in return. If Asti Spumante is the exuberant younger sibling, Alta Langa is the quietly distinguished elder. Less immediately obvious, and all the more rewarding for it.
Both, it must be said, have their place on the table. And both find that table most naturally in the hills around Canelli.
Food and Wine Pairing with Alta Langa
Alta Langa’s dry, structured character and fine acidity make it one of the most food-friendly sparkling wines produced anywhere in Italy.
As an aperitivo, it is incomparable. The bubbles are fine and persistent, the palate is clean and the wine opens rather than closes the appetite. Alongside Piedmontese antipasti, vitello tonnato, carne cruda, local salumi and aged cheeses, it performs with quiet authority.
With seafood, Alta Langa is in its element: oysters, langoustines, grilled fish and delicate crudi all find in it an ideal companion. The wine’s mineral quality and its long lees ageing give it the weight to stand up to richer dishes without overwhelming more delicate flavours.
And with white truffles, shaved generously over tajarin, risotto or simply scrambled eggs as the Piedmontese so wisely do, Alta Langa offers one of the great pairings of the Italian table. The earthiness of the tartufo and the structured elegance of the wine are, it turns out, made for each other. Which should surprise nobody who has spent any time in these hills.
Discovering Alta Langa in Canelli
Canelli remains, as it has been since 1865, the spiritual home of Italian sparkling wine. The Underground Cathedrals, now open to visitors, tell that story with more eloquence than any words can manage: kilometre upon kilometre of hand-carved tunnels, filled with bottles aging in the cool and the dark, the silence broken only by the occasional distant sound of the town going about its life above.
Several of the historic Canelli wine houses, Gancia, Contratto, Bosca, offer cellar tours and tastings, and the experience of descending into those extraordinary spaces and emerging with a glass of something very good indeed is one that stays with you.
At Relais Villa del Borgo, we are happy to help you plan your exploration of Alta Langa and the sparkling wine heritage of Canelli. Whether that means arranging a private cellar tour, recommending the right producers to visit, or simply ensuring that your first evening begins with a well-chosen bottle on the terrace. This is, after all, our territory. We know it rather well.
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