Roberto Conterno (of top Barolo producer Giacomo Conterno) brought a new focus to the historic Gattinara denomination when he bought a 90 per cent share in Cantine Nervi in 2018. He became the sole owner in 2022. The history of the company, the oldest winery brand in continuous production in Gattinara, had been decidedly mixed.

The wine company was founded in 1906 by Luigi Nervi. His son, Italo, bought additional vineyards and extended the cellar. However, he died with no direct heirs. At first, it was owned by its employees and then by steel magnate Germano Bocciolone. After his death in 1991, it was owned by his children. Subsequently, the company was saved from bankruptcy and bought in 2011 by a Norwegian group headed up by banker and wine enthusiast Erling Astrup, a collector of the great wines of Giacomo Conterno. This turned out to be a key connection as before he acquired Nervi, Astrup talked with Roberto Conterno. Having tasted older vintages, Conterno is reported as saying that it would be impossible not to make great wine here. 

When the Norwegian group sold the winery and vineyards to him, Roberto embarked on a complete restructuring of the site of the cellar, close to the centre of the small town. The old winery has been turned into an ambitious restaurant. A magnificent, completely new winery, designed by architect Gian Carlo Primatesta, has been built and equipped with rows of Stockinger fermentation vats and ageing barrels, and the same state-of-the-art bottling line as used in Barolo. Small amounts of the vineyard have been replanted but relatively little needed to be done here. The 28 hectares of vines mostly range from 15–40-years-old and are among the very best sites in terms of elevation and aspect.

Roberto had a hand in some winemaking decisions from the 2015 vintage, for example, choosing not to make single-vineyard wines in 2015 and 2017. Now as sole owner, he employs the same obsessive attention to detail here in Gattinara as in Barolo, assisted by his son Gabriele, Enrico Fileppo, longtime winemaker in Gattinara, and Matteo Gioiso, younger qualified winemaker. This is an impressive team, matched by the five permanent workers in the vineyard. As a result of all this investment in people, time and equipment, the quality of the wines has improved markedly in comparison with the past.

The level of selection is very high: only perfect bunches of grapes are allowed to enter the winery and then are subject to another level of scrutiny on a vibrating table. Grapes are de-stemmed and crushed into oak fermentation vessels and inoculated with selected yeast, again as in the Barolo winery. Each vineyard plot has its own tank. Temperature control is exercised principally by the length of rack and return done by the cellar staff, tank by tank, an enormous investment of time. Maceration is typically around 20 days but is judged solely by taste. 

The new wine is then racked directly to oak casks of 26-70 hectolitres for ageing for 30–32 months. The casks are only racked off perhaps once per year, always directly to wood with the aim of fixing the colour. In all its time in the winery, the wine spends only perhaps 12 hours in stainless steel. The wines are not filtered. All the Gattinara wines of the same vintage are bottled at the same time, with the single-vineyard wines being given an extra year in bottle before release.  

Two single-vineyard wines are produced as well as a multi-vineyard blend Gattinara.

Gattinara Vigna Valferana, eight hectares in total, of which around half goes into the single-vineyard bottling, is 320 metres in elevation and faces south to southwest. It was first bottled by Nervi as a single-vineyard wine as far back as 1974. It has the classic Gattinara soil based on red porphyry of volcanic origin, rich in iron and manganese.

Vigna Molsino, the very first single-vineyard bottling of Gattinara wine in 1970, also by Nervi, is at the heart of an amphitheatre, rises up to 420 metres and faces south to southeast. There is more sun here but also more of the refreshing breeze from Monte Rosa in the Alps. Of the 13 hectares, around seven-to-eight would normally be considered for the single-vineyard bottling. Typically, the Vigna Valferana wine is marked by more elegance, while Vigna Molsino is more powerful and fruitier. The multi-vineyard blend is from a selection of fruit from the two aforementioned single vineyards and from the winery’s other seven hectares in the Garavoglie, Casacce and Della Valle vineyards.

Roberto has undoubtedly brought new life to the sleeping giant of Gattinara, both architecturally and in terms of ambition for wine quality. He is fascinated by the fact that while his Gattinara and the Barolo wines are analytically very similar, in terms of aromas, they are very different. Asked whether this is due to the difference in climate (which is marginally cooler and much wetter in Gattinara) or the soils, he thinks for a moment and says it is the latter. In 2024, Barolo had similar levels of rain as is normal in Gattinara, but the wines still tasted different. It is precisely Nebbiolo’s ability to express terroir differences that was one of the motivating factors for his investment in Gattinara.