Collina Torinese DOC

The hills immediately east of Turin, rising straight out of the city across the Po. This is one of very few denominations in Italy whose vineyards sit inside a metropolitan area, and it survives on ground that is worth a great deal more as building land than as vineyard.

The Terroir The registered file is precise about both the rule and the geology. Vineyards must be planted no lower than 180 metres. The reliefs of the Turin hill, it says, present themselves as a set of more or less accentuated corrugations; that hill system is the consequence of orogenic pressures arriving from the south-east, along the plane of what is today the Po plain. In other words this ridge is a wrinkle pushed up at the edge of the Apennine collision, and its particular soils and orientation have allowed viticulture, the file notes, since the 1700s.

Grape Varieties The Piedmontese hill cast, without Nebbiolo. Barbera and Bonarda lead, with Freisa, Pelaverga and the two local Malvasias — Malvasia di Schierano and Malvasia Nera Lunga — alongside. The wines are made red and novello, at a minimum of only 10.5 per cent alcohol, which tells you what they are for.

Cari The file singles out one type as characteristic of the denomination: Cari, described simply as a light wine used by tradition on every festive occasion. It is the sort of detail that a legal document almost never records, and it defines the zone better than any tasting note — a wine that exists to be opened, not assessed.

The Critical Take Nobody outside Turin drinks Collina Torinese, and it is not trying to change that. The wines are light, sharp, faintly bitter and cheap, and they are made for the tables of a specific city. What makes the zone genuinely interesting is what it grows: Pelaverga and Malvasia di Schierano are varieties on the edge of disappearance, and the hills east of Turin, together with neighbouring Freisa di Chieri and Malvasia di Castelnuovo Don Bosco, are effectively their last commercial home. That is worth protecting whatever the wine scores.

Three Denominations, One Consortium Collina Torinese is administered together with Freisa di Chieri and Malvasia di Castelnuovo Don Bosco under a single protective consortium. The three overlap on the same ridge and divide it by grape rather than by ground, which is an unusual arrangement and a practical response to how little wine any one of them makes.

At the Table Turinese cooking: bagna càuda, vitello tonnato, agnolotti del plin, fried offal, and toma. The sweet Malvasia goes with hazelnut cake. Serve the reds cool, 14–15°C.

Benchmark Producers Balbiano at Andezeno, the reference for these hills, and Terre dei Santi at Castelnuovo Don Bosco.