In the opening months of 2026, Italy’s best wines outpaced Bordeaux and Burgundy on the Liv-ex indices, with Barolo registering some of the strongest gains. That performance continues a longer pattern: Italy was the most resilient region through the fine wine market’s 2024 correction, and merchant appetite has only strengthened since. What’s noted less often is where within Italy demand is concentrating. It’s not toward the barrique-driven, internationally styled wines that spread in the 1990s, but toward houses whose methods predate that era entirely. Antica Casa Vinicola Scarpa is one of them.
In Nizza Monferrato, Scarpa has made Barolo using long maceration and extended aging, releasing only when the house considers them ready, sometimes a decade or more after harvest. For much of the late twentieth century, that approach read as commercial stubbornness. It now reads as a point of difference that the market is beginning to price.
What is traditional Italian winemaking?
Traditional Italian winemaking favours indigenous-yeast fermentation and long ageing in large, old oak casks called botti. The fermentation relies on yeasts already present on the grapes and in the cellar rather than a chosen commercial strain, and the wines are held back and released late rather than pushed out at volume. It is a slower model than the international, oak-forward style that took hold in the 1990s, and a growing share of the fine-wine market is increasingly drawn to it.
The market that has moved most decisively in that direction came looking for something else first: Burgundy. But as top-end Burgundy has pushed further beyond reach, buyers have looked to Piedmont, where Nebbiolo offers comparable finesse and ageing for less. Like Burgundy, the region is mapped into named single vineyards, the crus that Barolo and Barbaresco formally codified over the past two decades, and it generally keeps the same pattern of small, family-run estates. That resemblance has turned curiosity into demand.
“For us, wine is a cultural product before it is a commercial one,” says Davide Champion, chief executive of Scarpa. “We have never chased trends or overproduced, so when the market came looking for this kind of wine again, there was nothing to undo.”
Why is Barolo aged in large casks called botti?
Barolo is aged in large old casks, called botti, because their size and age let a wine develop slowly without taking on heavy oak flavour. Where a small new barrique marks a wine, an old botte mostly stays out of the way, letting the fruit and the site carry it rather than the wood. It is the vessel traditional Barolo and Barbaresco have always been built around, and at Scarpa, it is a choice the house has made deliberately from the beginning.
How has Scarpa kept the same method since 1900?
The house has passed through only a few hands, each trained by the one before. Antonio Scarpa founded it in 1900; Mario Pesce took it on in 1949 and shaped its modern identity; Pesce’s nephew Carlo Castino followed, retiring in 2007 but never quite leaving, as he still lives above the cellars. Silvio Trinchero, who trained under Castino, now tends the cellar: the same method, the same hands. Davide Champion leads the house as chief executive. Since 2017, that lineage has been protected by owner Evgeny Strzhalkovskiy, who has renewed the cellars and added to the Barolo holdings, most notably the Monvigliero cru in Verduno, without changing how the wine is made.
“Every winemaker here learned it from the person before them,” Champion says. “The Scarpa method was handed down, not rewritten.”
Scarpa’s Barolo comes from two crus, Monvigliero in Verduno and Roncaglie in La Morra; its Barbaresco from Canova in Neive. Its flagship is La Bogliona, a single-vineyard Barbera that ages on a scale usually kept for Nebbiolo: a quiet argument that Barbera belongs in the cellar as much as on the table. The wines are still made in the original cellars at Nizza Monferrato, which hold a historic exemption allowing them to operate outside the formal Barolo zone, and the Caveau there keeps a library of older vintages. None of this was built for the market that has now arrived. It was simply never abandoned.
