Canelli DOCG

The historic heart of Moscato, promoted to its own DOCG in 2023 after decades as a named sub-zone of Asti. Canelli covers hillside vineyards across seventeen communes straddling the Asti and Cuneo provinces, centred on the town whose name it carries — the place where Italian sparkling wine effectively began.

Why Canelli Carlo Gancia founded his house here in 1850 and made Italy’s first traditional-method sparkling wine in the 1860s, and the town became the engineering centre of the industry: the cattedrali sotterranee, kilometres of tufa cellars cut beneath the streets and now a UNESCO World Heritage site, were built to store it. Canelli has therefore always been treated as the reference point within the Moscato zone, and the DOCG formalises what the trade had assumed for a century.

The Terroir The Canelli hills are steep, calcareous and marl-heavy, with the pale Sant’Agata marls that also underlie Barbaresco appearing across the zone. The DOCG admits hillside sites only — valley floor is excluded outright — and yields are capped below those of the parent appellation. Altitude and exposure matter more for Moscato than for almost any other Italian grape, because the object is aromatic concentration at very low potential alcohol, and a warm flat site delivers neither.

Grape Varieties Moscato Bianco alone. It is one of the oldest cultivated varieties in Italy and one of the few whose wine genuinely smells of the fruit it came from — sage, elderflower, white peach, orange blossom. The style is the low-alcohol, lightly sparkling one: fermentation is arrested while sugar remains, so the wine sits around 5% and keeps its primary aromatics intact.

The Critical Take The case for a Canelli DOCG is a site argument rather than a stylistic one: the wine is recognisably Moscato d’Asti, but from the steep marl slopes that give it the most perfume and the firmest acid line. Whether the market will pay a premium for that distinction is not yet settled — the denomination is new and thinly planted — but the ambition is legitimate, and it gives the zone’s serious growers a label that separates them from industrial Asti Spumante.

At the Table Peaches, fruit tarts, almond biscuits, and in Piedmont a slice of plain cake at breakfast. It is also one of the few wines that copes with genuinely spiced food, where the sweetness and the low alcohol both help. Serve at 6–8°C and drink within a year of the harvest.

Benchmark Producers Gancia, Coppo, Contratto, Ca’ d’Gal, Bera.