Cantina Taia

Concrete, Pinot Nero, and a narrow brief

Concrete takes the Pinot Nero first. Nicola Biasi, winemaker at Cantina Taia in Montecalvo Versiggia, works with the family cellar in the Oltrepò Pavese hills, where a young estate has been built around fruit from its own slopes. His route to this bench runs through wineries in Italy, Australia, and South Africa, then through a long Tuscan chapter with Marchesi Mazzei and Poggio al Tesoro. In 2020 he founded Nicola Biasi Consulting; at Cantina Taia, that consulting practice has a precise agricultural address. The cellar opened in 2022, but the land connection reaches back through Stefania Scarabelli’s family, to vineyards bought by her great-grandfather Carlo and grandfather Alfredo. For years, the grapes went to local cooperatives and wine stayed inside the family. Scarabelli’s return to Montecalvo Versiggia changed the scale of the gesture, not its origin. Taia was her childhood nickname, used by her grandparents and parents when she had done something good. Here, that private word became a public cellar.

Fifteen hectares between two villages

The estate works about 15 hectares between Montecalvo Versiggia and Santa Maria della Versa, in Oltrepò Pavese DOC country. The vineyards sit between 300 and 600 meters, on calcareous soils often mixed with clay, a frame that suits Pinot Nero and gives Biasi a clear line to follow in the cellar. Pinot Nero leads the program, for red wine, rosato, and sparkling bases, with Riesling Renano, Barbera, Croatina, Chardonnay, Moscato, and Pinot Grigio also planted on the family property. The method stays deliberately close to the fruit. Pinot Nero ferments in thermocontrolled concrete for approximately 15 days, with malolactic fermentation also taking place in concrete. Stainless steel follows, preserving primary fruit rather than placing oak in front of the site. The house’s stated direction is sustainable viticulture, but Biasi’s own order of priorities is plainer: “They want to drink wine because it’s good. If it’s also sustainable, that is an added value.”

A tasting room above the rows

The cellar is small, family-run, and set into hills that do much of the speaking before a glass is poured. From the tasting room, the room looks outward to vineyard rows rather than inward to theatre; the pace is conversational, with the story of the land close to the bottles. The texture is intimate without becoming precious. Scarabelli’s family history sits beside Biasi’s technical discipline, and neither needs to crowd the other. In the glass, the same restraint appears in the estate’s dry rosato from Pinot Nero, its Riesling Renano, and Il Rosso, a cuvée drawn from the red side of the Oltrepò. The next measure here is not volume, but whether this young cellar keeps refining its narrow brief: Pinot Nero, concrete, stainless steel, and the name Taia.