Orsolani's La Rustìa: A Dry Erbaluce from the Canavese Moraine Hills
A family that came home from America in 1894 and the still white that has just won Tre Bicchieri again, from the 2025 harvest.
Il Vino Bello ·
Red wines take most of Piemonte's top awards, as Gambero Rosso itself has noted. So it is worth noticing a white from north of Turin that keeps turning up on the lists. La Rustìa, the dry Erbaluce di Caluso of Orsolani, was named in Gambero Rosso's Tre Bicchieri 2027 list for Piemonte for its 2025 vintage, one of only two Erbaluce di Caluso on that list. Vinibuoni d'Italia gave the same wine its Corona for 2027 too (more in our piece on the other guides).
A family that came home
The estate's own history starts at the end of the nineteenth century, when Giovanni Orsolani and his wife Domenica came back from America to the Canavese, "called back by nostalgia for their own land" (our translation). They opened an inn there, the Locanda Aurora. Domenica ran the kitchen while Giovanni worked the vines and made the wine for the customers.
Four generations later the family works only in wine. Orsolani makes about 150,000 bottles a year, and the estate says 90% of them are Erbaluce, which it calls "the family's true love" (our translation). It also claims a local first: the Canavese tradition of making sparkling wine from Erbaluce, the estate writes, was born in its cellar in 1968.
Erbaluce di Caluso in a few lines
Erbaluce is a white grape grown mainly in the Canavese and around Lake Viverone, across the provinces of Turin, Vercelli and Biella. Gambero Rosso describes the area as a natural amphitheatre of gently rolling glacial hills, with free-draining soils full of pebbles and minerals, and notes that the name is thought to come from the Latin "Alba Lux". Orsolani's own presentation adds that these soils are the crust of the Valle d'Aosta mountains, carried down by the glaciers, and that the average yearly temperature sits just under 13 degrees, with August peaks of 25.
The rules are simple. Erbaluce di Caluso, also sold as plain "Caluso", was a DOC from 1967 and became a DOCG in 2010. It must be 100% Erbaluce, from vineyards yielding no more than 11 tonnes per hectare, and the dry wine needs at least 11% alcohol and 5 grams per litre of total acidity. The vintage must be on the label of the still wine. The same rules describe the traditional pergola calusiese, with rows more than five metres apart and about a thousand vines per hectare, pruned long because Erbaluce bears little fruit on its first three or four buds. The same grape also makes metodo classico sparkling wine and a passito, like Cieck's Alladium.
La Rustìa in the glass
La Rustìa is the estate's selection of Erbaluce for its still white. Gambero Rosso placed Orsolani's vineyards mainly on the hills between Mazzè and Caluso when it profiled the estate in January 2025, and said the family farms them with low-impact practices.
In the estate's own words, the wine is straw yellow with faint, bright yellow hints. The nose mixes sage and aromatic herbs with white peach and ripe pink grapefruit. On the palate the estate calls it "serious, consistent", with a long finish and a mineral note, and it credits the wine's character to strict selection of the grapes and "obsessive care for detail" at every stage in the cellar (both our translation).
This is not a one-off. The estate's awards page lists Tre Bicchieri for La Rustìa from the 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2019 and 2020 vintages, and 2025 now joins them. A young bottle is the obvious buy, but Erbaluce is known for ageing: Gazzetta del Gusto wrote in 2023, the year the Regione named it Piemonte's grape of the year, that mineral and more developed notes come out after three or four years. For the table, the Turin Chamber of Commerce's producer page says the dry Erbaluce is excellent with light first courses, and Gambero Rosso suggests vegetable dishes or seafood for still Erbaluce.
The rest of the range, and a visit
The cellar's other wines show what the grape can do. Cuvée Tradizione is an extra brut metodo classico, and its 2019 is among AIS's Vitae 2027 "100 Vini di Territorio". Cuvée 1968 is a brut named for the year the family first made sparkling Erbaluce. Sulè is the passito, and Vintàge is an aged Erbaluce white.
In the vineyards, the estate says it uses only organic fertilisers and low-impact treatments, does most of the work by hand to limit tractor use, and gets nearly all the energy it needs from its own solar panels, which it says avoid about 200 quintals of CO2 a year.
Visits and tastings are by appointment, Tuesday to Saturday, booked by phone, email or WhatsApp. The cellar shop in San Giorgio Canavese is open on weekdays from 9:00 to 12:00 and 15:00 to 18:00, and on Saturdays from 9:00 to 13:00 and 15:00 to 18:00.
There is also a seasonal reason to look around the area now. The Canavese wine consorzio paired 17 of its wineries with 17 local pastry shops for "Dolce Canavese": each pairing made a panettone and a savoury speciality from that cellar's wine, on sale from mid-November in the shops and cellars taking part. The competition's prizes have now been awarded, the consorzio wrote on 12 November.
See Orsolani for its wines, awards and how to visit.
Sources
- https://vinodabere.it/gambero-rosso-i-tre-bicchieri-2027-del-piemonte/ (16 Oct 2026)
- https://vinibuoni.it/i-vini-della-corona/ (edition 2027)
- https://www.orsolani.it/la-nostra-storia
- https://www.orsolani.it/riconoscimenti
- https://www.orsolani.it/dal-vigneto-al-bicchiere
- https://www.orsolani.it/_files/ugd/3ec069_e9a7397d002c453fa98dcb00f18218b6.pdf (estate presentation)
- https://www.gamberorossointernational.com/news/the-white-wine-side-of-piedmont-here-are-the-10-best-erbaluce-di-caluso-chosen-by-gambero-rosso (24 Jan 2025)
- https://www.valoritalia.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Erbaluce-di-Caluso-o-Caluso.pdf (DOCG rules)
- https://www.gazzettadelgusto.it/vino/caratteristiche-erbaluce-vitigno-piemontese-dell-anno/ (22 Jun 2023)
- https://www.to.camcom.it/orsolani
- https://www.erbalucecarema.it/17-cantine-17-pasticcerie-un-solo-risultato-dolce-canavese-%F0%9F%8D%B7%F0%9F%8D%9E/ (19 Oct 2026)
- https://www.erbalucecarema.it/dolce-canavese-grazie-a-tutte-le-cantine/ (12 Nov 2026)