Coppo: Barbera, Bubbles, and Canelli's Underground Cathedrals
Since 1892, one of Asti's most storied producers
Il Vino Bello ·
Canelli is a small Asti town best known for two things: Moscato, and what lies beneath it. A network of vast, cool cellars carved into the local sandstone, the Cattedrali Sotterranee or Underground Cathedrals, has been used for aging sparkling wine here for over a century, and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2014 as part of "The Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont." Coppo, founded in Canelli in 1892, is one of the cellars' custodians.
Four generations in, the estate's identity is built on two things that do not always share a shelf: Barbera and Metodo Classico sparkling wine. The flagship is Nizza Pomorosso, a single-vineyard Barbera named for a red apple tree that grows on the hill above the vines, widely credited as one of the wines that helped rehabilitate Barbera's reputation from everyday table wine to something capable of real ambition and age-worthiness. Alongside it sits the Alta Langa range, Coppo's Pinot Nero and Chardonnay based Metodo Classico sparklers, including a Riserva dedicated to founder Piero Coppo that the estate holds back for only its best vintages.
According to Coppo's own account, the estate has also been producing Barolo since the 1950s, notable because Coppo sits outside Barolo's strict production zone, a legacy right that predates the DOCG's modern boundaries. True to a house built on Barbera and bubbles, though, it is the wines named after the family, Piero and Luigi, and the land itself that carry the most weight here.
A sommelier's note on Metodo Classico. This is the same method used in Champagne: a still base wine gets a second fermentation inside the very bottle it will be sold in, then rests on its own spent yeast (the lees) for months or years before disgorgement. That lees contact is what gives Alta Langa its characteristic bready, brioche-like depth alongside the fruit, rather than the simpler, fruitier profile of tank-method sparklers like Prosecco. Alta Langa DOCG requires a minimum of thirty months on the lees for the base wine and thirty six for a Riserva, genuinely serious numbers that put it closer to Champagne's own standards than most Italian sparkling wine. Serve it properly cold, around 8 to 10°C, in a white wine glass rather than a narrow flute if you want to actually smell it.
Coppo welcomes visitors for tastings, worth booking ahead if a trip to Canelli is on the itinerary.