2020 Giuseppe Mascarello e Figlio Freisa Toetto

In 1517, customs officers in Pancalieri recorded Freisa selling for nearly twice the price of ordinary wine. By 1875, a third of all vineyard land in Asti and Alessandria was planted to it. As recently as 1970 there were more than 7,000 hectares of Freisa in Italy. Today there are roughly 1,000 left in all of Piedmont.

Growers pulled it out to plant Nebbiolo, which turned out to be an ironic move. DNA work at the University of Turin in 2004 established that Freisa and Nebbiolo are first-degree relatives, parent and offspring. Piedmont tore out one to plant the other.

Giuseppe Mascarello never stopped. The family has been in Castiglione Falletto since 1904, when Maurizio Mascarello bought Monprivato, the vineyard people call the Musigny of Barolo. Toetto sits right beside it. It is half a hectare, planted in 1989, facing north and west on calcareous clay, and it is all the Freisa they make.

The cellar is a museum of enormous Slavonian botti between twenty and seventy years old. The fruit ferments under a floating cap for fifteen to twenty days, ages a few months in medium oak, and does not leave the building until two years after harvest.