A white wine from the most serious red wine village in Italy.
Serralunga d’Alba is Barolo. Four hectares, four grapes, and a white nobody went there looking for.
- GrapeChardonnay · Nascetta · Sauvignon · Riesling
- GrowerLuigi Baudana
- PlaceSerralunga d'Alba, Langhe · Italy
Good. It gets in the way.
Serralunga d’Alba is one of the great Barolo villages, and Barolo comes with a lot of ceremony attached — decanters, vintages, people using the word "austere" without irony.
None of that applies here. This is the white the grower made because he wanted a glass of something cold at the end of a day spent on red wine.
You do not need to know any of the above to enjoy it. It is simply a very good white. The story is a bonus, not an entry requirement.
Four hectares, and a family that took over rather than take out.
Luigi Baudana is a small estate — just over four hectares, all inside the commune of Serralunga d’Alba, with the cellar in the hamlet of Baudana and vines in the Baudana and Cerretta crus.
In the early 1980s Luigi planted Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc on the cooler, north-eastern shoulder of Cerretta. Nobody plants white grapes in Serralunga. He did it anyway.
In 2009 the Vajra family took over the running of the estate. The interesting part is what they did next: instead of clearing the whites out for more Nebbiolo, they kept them and added Nascetta — a Piedmontese white variety almost nobody grows — and a touch of Riesling.
So the bottle is roughly half Chardonnay, then Nascetta, Sauvignon and a little Riesling. Four grapes that have no business being in the same wine, from a village that has no business making white at all.
For the white pizza, and for the first ten minutes.
It is dry and mineral with real aromatic lift — the Sauvignon and Riesling do that — over a broader Chardonnay body. Crisp without being thin.
That makes it the bottle for a pizza bianca: no tomato, just cheese, oil and whatever else is on it. Without tomato’s acidity to lean on, a wine has to bring its own, and this one does.
It is also the right thing to open first, before anyone has decided what they are eating. Cold, dry, aromatic — it works with the olives and the waiting.
Piedmont and Naples do not usually share a table.
Northern Italy and southern Italy have been arguing about food for as long as there has been an Italy. Butter and rice up there; tomato, oil and dough down here.
Daniele is from Naples and pours a Piedmontese white anyway. In Cyprus, four hundred kilometres of sea from either of them, the argument turns out not to matter very much.
Come and open it first.
Order it before you have decided on the pizza. It is the bottle for the part of the evening when nothing has been decided yet. We stop at a hundred pizzas a day — the earlier you come, the better your chances.
The things people actually ask.
Q.What is Langhe Bianco?
Langhe Bianco is the appellation for white wine from the Langhe hills of Piedmont in north-west Italy, the same area as Barolo and Barbaresco. Because the region is overwhelmingly planted to red grapes, white wines from the Langhe are relatively rare.
Q.What is in Dragon?
Dragon is a Langhe Bianco from Luigi Baudana in Serralunga d’Alba. It blends roughly 56% Chardonnay with Nascetta, Sauvignon Blanc and a small proportion of Riesling. The Chardonnay and Sauvignon come from vines Luigi Baudana planted on the north-eastern shoulder of the Cerretta vineyard in the early 1980s.
Q.What is Nascetta?
Nascetta is a white grape variety native to the Langhe in Piedmont, Italy. It is grown by very few producers and is one of the few indigenous white varieties of an area otherwise dominated by the red Nebbiolo.
Q.Where can I drink white wine from Piedmont in Cyprus?
Filomena Pizzeria Napoletana, at 1 Aristotelous in Larnaca, Cyprus, pours a short list of wines from small growers, including Luigi Baudana’s Dragon Langhe Bianco from Serralunga d’Alba in Piedmont, alongside Neapolitan pizza. It is open Tuesday to Sunday, 6pm to 10pm.