Cortese is Gavi — a bright, dry, high-acid white from the hills of south-eastern Piedmont that became, in the 1970s and 80s, the fashionable Italian white on smart tables. Pale and citrus-driven, with green apple, lime and a stony finish, it is the region's crisp answer to a plate of seafood from the not-far Ligurian coast.
Restrained and unshowy, it lives or dies on freshness; over-cropped it can be thin, but from the better Gavi communes it gains a fine almond-and- mineral texture and even ages gracefully for a few years. It is Piedmont's quiet white counterweight to its towering reds.