Winemaking at Castello di Tassarolo in Piemonte, Italy, dates back to 1367.

In the early 2000s Massimiliana Spinola inherited the estate and converted it to biodynamic farming, breathing new life back into a tired soil. Some of you may have bought her wines in the past, including the ‘Titouan’ Barbera, named after the first heavy horse to pull the plough between the vines.

Now there’s a new generation moving into view, as Massimiliana’s teenage son Ato has made his own range of small batch wines. You can see his distinctive dreadlocks on the labels of these three different expressions of the Cortese di Gavi grape – one sparkling, one still, and one macerated or ‘orange’.

Ato’s intention is to go further into natural winemaking, to rub the polish off of Gavi and to produce something breathing, rough, real.

The sparkling wine is a pet nat, or pétillant naturel, also known as the ancestral method of sparkling wine making. The fermentation completes inside the bottle, and the carbon dioxide that’s released naturally makes the wine gently fizzy. Undisgorged, unfiltered and unfined, the wine sits on its lees (spent yeast cells) until you open it, making the wines quite cloudy and wonderfully fresh. Enticing notes of lemon, custard apple and yeast here.

The still Cortese di Gavi has a bold attack, with arrestingly aromatic top notes of beeswax and butter; with aeration, they soften into a more delicate bouquet of pear, grapefruit and almond.

The macerated/orange wine is fermented in an amphora, which perhaps enhances its  dry, saline and uncompromising character. The aromas are surprisingly refined, with notes of lemon pith, dried apricot, root ginger and mandarin orange.

All the wines have impressive concentration and length, and clean, resolved finishes, which lead you back for the next sip. Quite a debut from this intimidatingly capable Zoomer…