Francesco Iandolo

A mathematician turns to Timorasso

Hand-harvested Timorasso comes in for soft pressing before steel fermentation; Francesco Iandolo, winemaker at Francesco Iandolo in Brignano Frascata, built this work around that decision. Since 2018, he has held the estate under his own name in Cà dell’Aglio, above Brignano Frascata, after leaving a life shaped by astronomy, mathematics, finance, and banking in Italy and abroad. The move was not toward a broad cellar of varieties. It became a contraction, a discipline.

The current identity rests on the Tortonese hills and on Timorasso, the white grape that has become the estate’s language. Iandolo acquired a ten-hectare parcel in 2018, with six cultivated hectares, then narrowed the project after an earlier phase between Langa and Monferrato that included Barbera d’Asti and Nizza DOCG. That phase lasted three years. What remains here is more exacting: a small address, a single principal variety, and a winemaker whose earlier training in numbers seems to have found a field form in rows, exposure, density, and time.

Steel, lees, and weekly bâtonnage

The vineyard sits at 350 meters in the Cà dell’Aglio locality, on stony calcareous-clay hillsides with south-west exposure. The farming is biological, with a vineyard density of 4,000 vines per hectare; the estate’s scale is small, around 8,000 bottles a year from the six cultivated hectares. Those figures matter here because the wine does not read as a portfolio exercise. It reads as a set of repeated choices.

For the Colli Tortonesi Timorasso Derthona 2022, the grapes are harvested by hand, pressed softly, and fermented in stainless steel at controlled temperature. The wine then spends a year on its lees in steel, with weekly bâtonnage, before a matching period in bottle ahead of release. No oak program is published for this wine. The method keeps attention on texture, acidity, and the slow gain in breadth that Timorasso can carry when the cellar lets it stay on the fine lees rather than rushing it to market.

The cellar below Cà dell’Aglio

The place is a working hillside estate before it is anything else. The cellar is small, technical, and close to the vines; the tasting room, when the house receives visitors, belongs to that same register of soil, vintage, and stainless steel rather than performance. Outside, the rows sit in a quiet rural fold of the Tortonese, stony underfoot and calcareous in character, with the altitude doing its part in the fruit’s lift.

Inside, the craft is spare enough to make each decision visible. Timorasso enters, steel holds it, lees give it weight, and bottle age finishes the first part of the work. The room does not need a large cast to explain itself. Iandolo’s discipline is in the narrowing, from finance to farming, from multiple zones to Cà dell’Aglio, from range to Timorasso Derthona.

A young estate, already narrowed

The first label cited for the estate’s Timorasso dates to 2020, and the 2022 Colli Tortonesi Timorasso Derthona is the clearest published marker of where the work now stands. The next movement here is likely to be read not through expansion, but through vintage: how the same grape, the same steel, and the same hillside answer each year. For now, the cellar’s argument is held in Timorasso Derthona 2022.