From the hills of south-eastern Piedmont, close to the Ligurian border, Gavi is Cortese at its brightest: a pale, dry, crisp white of green apple, citrus and stone, made for the seafood of the coast just over the hills. In the 1980s it became the fashionable Italian white of smart restaurants, and its reputation has been steadying ever since.
Unlike the region's monumental reds it asks nothing of the cellar — it is a wine of freshness and precision, drunk young and cold. From the best communes around the town of Gavi it gains a fine almond-and-mineral texture, Piedmont's cool, quiet answer to its own grandeur.