Togliana. Carema Riserva

Achille Milanesio is Cantina Togliana
Carema DOC
Grape: Nebbiolo (known locally as Picotendro)

2017 (a few bottles left)
Rose, vanilla flowers, pure bramble and plum aromas that morph neatly into the finest and most finely poised palate, where salted chocolate-orange flavours weave their way through textured, floral fruit.  13.5%

2018
Bramble and orange peel, blueberry and rose, silky tannins. A wine with sublime freshness and clarity. 13.5%

Achille Milanesio, Carema producer page

Achille's Carema Riserva is from a site, or Cru called ‘Runc’.  The Picotendro (Nebbiolo) vines are on a steeply terraced south-facing slope.  The vines are between 20 and 30 years old and are masal* selections.  The training is on a particular high pergola, known locally as ‘Topia’.  It is a system that requires exhaustive work, no tractors, everything is manual, this is truly heroic viticulture.
Prior to the harvest, Achille makes a pied de cuve* in the vineyard, to select unadulterated, strong, native yeasts.  The grapes are hand-picked by the family, crushed, and tipped into a steel tank, where the pied de cuve awaits them.  The fermentation lasts just over 2 weeks, the wine then spends another month with the skins submerged, before being racked into a clean steel tank where it goes through malolactic conversion*.  The wine is aged in a used French tonneaux* for a year before it is bottled without filtration.

The 2018 saw a change of branding: new label and the emergence of Cantina Togliana