The Other Side of Piemonte: Young Growers, Honest Bottles and One Very Good Wine Bar

There is a version of Piemonte that fits on a wine list and a version that does not. The first is the one everyone knows: the big Barolo names, the allocations, the bottles that ask for a decade and a mortgage. The second is quieter, younger, mostly under 20 euro and often uncertified, and I fell into it one afternoon with Lorenzo Labriot at Caffe dell'Orologio in Turin, a whole side of the region I had no idea was there. Nobody really talks about it, nobody writes about it, so short of standing in that room I would never have found it. This side hardly makes the trophy shelf, and it is the side of the region I would drive back for.

Here is how to find the other Piemonte: start with the grower who sums it up, learn to read past the label, then track down the honest bottles already hiding inside the famous cellars, and finish at the Turin bar where you can taste all of it in one sitting before you go looking.

The 19-year-old who started bottling her family's grapes

In the hills around Novello, in the heart of Barolo country, the Valletti family have grown grapes for four generations. For most of that time they did exactly that and no more: farm the fruit, sell it on, let somebody else put their name on the wine. Then in 2019 the daughter, Roberta, then just 19, decided to keep a small slice of the harvest and make her own wine. She now farms alongside her parents Floriana and Beppe and her younger sister Georgia, raises two small children between the rows, and turns out a few hundred bottles a year under her own label, Valletti Roberta.

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1. Roberta on the right and her sister Georgia on the left, at the door of the family house where they hosted my tasting.
2. The flight of all three wines the family makes, every label painted by the local artist Bruno Murialdo.
3. The little village and its white church, the view the vineyards look out on.
4. Georgia, who is taking a winemaking degree in Piemonte, in the tasting room the family built inside their own home.
5. Feeding time: the youngest sister, Georgia in the middle and their father Beppe with the cows that graze between the vines all summer in their big Alpine bells.

The farming is organic. The paperwork is not. That gap is the whole story of small-grower Piemonte.

Here is the part that stayed with me. Everything the family harvests is organic, right down to the yeasts they buy in. But they do not own a cellar, so Roberta makes her wine at a neighbour's winery that is not certified organic, which means her own bottles cannot legally carry the word either. Organic farming, no organic label: the exact trap that keeps a lot of honest small growers off the certified shelf. She sells most of her fruit and vinifies only what she can, so there are no exports yet. If you want the wine, you go to her.

It is worth keeping three words apart, because the shelf blurs them into one. Organic farming is about the vineyard, no synthetic sprays or fertilisers, worked to a standard. Organic certified is the paperwork, and it covers the cellar too, which is exactly where Roberta falls out. Natural, or low intervention, is about the winemaking: little or nothing added, minimal filtering, as little sulphur as the wine will take. A bottle can be one of these without being the others, so the front label is a poor guide to what is actually in the glass. Ask the grower how they farm and how they make the wine, and trust that over the label every time.

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What she makes is worth the detour. Her 2024 Nascetta, the old Novello white that had almost died out before local growers revived it, spends five hours on the skins in the cold and a couple of months on the lees, and comes out taut and saline with almond and lemon, a serious wine at 16 euro. The 2021 Roccia Langhe Dolcetto, held back a vintage because Covid shut every door she could have sold it through, is dark, honest and 8 euro. Even the labels are local: a nearby artist, Bruno Murialdo, who also writes for the town paper, paints every one of their labels. This is what the other Piemonte looks like up close, a young woman, an organic vineyard, no cellar of her own, and wine good enough to make the certification feel beside the point.

Go for the visit as much as the wine. Roberta pours at the family place herself, and it is the kind of afternoon you plan a trip around rather than squeeze in. This is not a counter and a card machine, it is a working farm that happens to make serious wine.

Between the rows the family keeps their own cows, and in the barn they milk them and turn the milk into cheese by hand. They set that cheese on the table beside the bottles, so you taste the farm and the wine together, at the same table, with the whole family around you and the children underfoot. You leave with wine you cannot buy anywhere else and the taste of the place still with you. This is the stop that makes the other Piemonte click into place, and the reason I would send anyone to Novello.

The honest bottles hiding inside the famous cellars

The scale of it surprises people. More than a fifth of all Italy's vineyards are now farmed organically, roughly 132,000 hectares, the highest share of any country in the world, and the number is still climbing. Yet a lot of what a curious drinker would call clean, honest wine sits just outside that official count: growers like Roberta who farm organically but cannot certify, or established estates who quietly make a low-added-sulphur cuvee without shouting about it.

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You do not need a fringe natural bar to drink this way, because some of the region's established names quietly make the most low-intervention wines of all. Up in Roero, Malvira, whose name is old local dialect for the house that faced the wrong way, makes a sparkling wine called Brut Nature No. Zero. The 2020 is 100 percent Nebbiolo, organically grown, pressed straight, four years on the lees, and zero dosage, meaning not a gram of sugar added at the end to soften it. It is bone dry, taut and completely honest, the antidote to sweetened cheap fizz.

Two more from the same week made the point. Viberti bottles a 2023 Langhe Chardonnay called "Rinato" with no added sulphites and the lees worked in a reductive, protective way, just 4500 bottles, and it comes out full and creamy with apricot, peach and a lick of lemon peel that keeps going, proof that no-added-sulphur does not have to mean funky or fragile. And down near Novello, young Luca Marenco makes his 2024 Nascetta in steel only, no oak at all, so the fennel-fresh, lemony, mineral character of the grape comes through clean. None of these growers would call themselves a natural-wine act. They just make honest wine, which is rather the point.

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1. How the bar looks: almost every table has its own chess board beside it.
2. The enoteca's sparkling selection is phenomenal, and every price tag is written by hand. A true candy shop for the wine lover.
3. The dessert board and the coffee machine.
4. Blue Bongiorno and chef Elisabetta Desana with the team behind the bar at Caffe dell'Orologio.
5. Chef Elisabetta Desana at work in her kitchen through the busy lunch hour.
6. Sit at the bar and let Blue and his team guide you through everything they have open, or buy a bottle from the shop to drink at the table.
7. The entrance to the Caffe.
8. The best Gnocchi con toma 'Lait brusc' I have ever eaten.
9. The bar, seen from the other side.

Where to taste it all: a Turin wine bar called 'the Clock'

If you want the whole of this other Piemonte in one room before you drive out to chase it, go to Caffe dell'Orologio, the Clock, in San Salvario, the young, student-heavy district near Turin's main station. It is a piola, the Piemontese word for a small honest neighbourhood eating house, crossed with a natural wine bar and a bottle shop, on Via Oddino Morgari. My hiking guide from the Canavese, Lorenzo Labriot, took me there, and it is where the region's quieter side finally clicked into place.

I walked in the piola and it was packed with people, tables for two and for 6 everything was full. Luckily Lorenzo had saved us a seat, and it was worth every minute spent inside. The scent of good food, amazing coffee that alone had made me happy, but then Blue Bongiorno, a good friend of Lorenzo, asked me what I wanted to drink and I said, "surprise me". Blue runs the wine side of the Orologio with Lorenzo Coscia while Elisabetta Desana is their amazing chef, three friends who opened the place themselves as a modern piola built entirely around Piemonte, art on the walls and all, with a list they fill from overlooked corners like the Valsusa and the hills around Tortona. He came back with two natural wines and it was a blast. Both turned out to be from a producer called Valdisole: a pale, fragrant red called Pnoi and another called Outopia. We tasted them side by side as a little flight, and that was the moment the other side of Piemonte, the one I did not really know existed until then, finally landed in the glass.

Valdisole: a Greek winemaker reviving Piemonte's forgotten grapes

Valdisole is a tiny natural operation up in the Roero, bottling under the name Heroic Vineyards, run by a Greek winemaker, Nikos Manesis, who has wrapped his whole Piedmont range in Greek philosophy and language, every label a single word: Arke for beginning, Armonia for harmony, Panta Rhei for Heraclitus's everything flows. Half of what he makes he deliberately declassifies to plain "Vino", not because it is lesser wine but because stepping outside the appellation buys him the freedom to chase forgotten grapes, work in amphorae and ferment the way he wants, without a rulebook dictating which variety he may even name on the label.

The two he poured me showed exactly what that freedom is for. Pnoi, Greek for breath, is his attempt to taste his way back to how Nebbiolo drank before Barolo became the big, structured red we know today: gentle pressing, old wood, barely any colour pulled from the skins, so it comes out pale and perfumed, almost a reconstruction of a wine that predates modern Barolo, and it sells for 25 euro. Outopia, from the words 'ou' and 'topos', means 'the place that does not exist', is a near-forgotten aromatic Piedmontese red he has reinvented as a dry wine, the grape left off the label on purpose. The grape is Moscato Nero, a rare red-skinned Muscat that Piemonte almost always turned into sweet wine, here made bone dry. He also makes an amber wine, Elektra, from a rare native variety Malvasia Moscata, an aromatic white that exists nowhere but Piemonte, which he helped bring back from almost nothing. I could have stayed all afternoon listening, and that, more than any one bottle, is the other side of Piemonte.

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1. Outopia 2023, Valdisole's bone-dry take on the near-forgotten Moscato Nero.
2. Pnoi 2023, a pale, perfumed reconstruction of how Nebbiolo drank before Barolo.
3. I asked Blue to surprise me and he brought two bottles from Valdisole.

A shared lunch with Lorenzo

In the meantime, Lorenzo explained everything that was on the menu and we had a taste of so many different dishes, so that I could taste whatever was local to Piemonte. We had Carne Cruda alla Vecchia Maniera, Gnocchi con toma 'Lait brusc' (the best gnocchi I ever ate), Tajarin al ragu, Capunet, and as dessert we both took the sweet and the cheese platter.

What makes Caffe dell'Orologio the right base is the attitude. The list keeps to natural and organic, poured by people who can tell you exactly how each wine was made, and the kitchen matches it with local, seasonal, mostly organic food, right down to a monthly night built around one dish cooked the way somebody's grandmother made it. Lunch is early, aperitivo and dinner run into the evening. Sit at the bar, ask what is open, and you can taste your way across the other Piemonte in an afternoon, then buy a few bottles at their shop to take with you.

How to build a trip around the other side

The shape is easy. Base a night or two in Turin and make Caffe dell'Orologio your tasting room, ask Blue Bongiorno for the insider's view, and use this to work out which growers and styles you actually want to chase. Then drive out. The famous cellars will sell you their low-intervention cuvees on the same visit as their flagships, so you do not have to choose between the trophy Piemonte and the honest one. And book a small grower directly: a producer like Roberta does tastings at the family place, children welcome, the kind of visit where you meet the whole family and leave with wine you cannot buy anywhere else.

Two practical notes. Bring an empty case, because the best of these bottles never leave Italy: no exports mean the only way to drink them at home is to carry them there. And keep your budget relaxed, because this is not where the money goes. The wines that made this side of the trip sit mostly between 8 and 35 euro, which is the quiet joy of the other Piemonte. The stories are bigger than the prices.

The famous Piemonte will always be there, gated behind allocations and waiting lists, and it earns its reputation. But the region I want to send people to is the other one: a 19-year-old bottling her family's organic grapes because nobody else would, a wrong-way-facing house making bone-dry Nebbiolo fizz, a Turin bar pouring it all by the glass. Skip it and you have seen the trophy cabinet. Find it and you have met the region.

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Written by

Margot van Lieshout DipWSET FWS RV

Wine marketeer, sales expert with over 20 years in the trade, public speaker and international wine judge. Thousands of wines scored from Steiermark to Ningxia, and a trade she knows from the inside out. Wine with Margot is where she helps wine brands tell the stories that sell them.

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