Garrone

Manual harvest, family line

The hand harvest sets the tone before the cellar does. Marco Garrone, winemaker at Garrone in Grana Monferrato, works within a family estate whose discipline begins in the vineyard and follows the fruit into wood and steel. The house traces its commercial line to Evasio Garrone in the early twentieth century, when wine moved through direct relationships with customers, especially around Turin. Luigi Garrone later shifted the work from buying finished wine to buying grapes and making the wine under the family name, a decision that brought quality control closer to the hands. Today the estate sits in Monferrato Astigiano, with about twelve hectares of vines across Grana, Montemagno and Castagnole Monferrato. Marco’s place in that line is practical rather than decorative: he is identified by the house as an oenologist, working inside a family structure that also includes Dante Garrone and Cinzia, Marco’s wife. The vineyard base carries the long work of planting and replanting, with parcels mostly planted between 1980 and 1995, and further plantings in the early 2000s. The varieties are the vocabulary of this part of Piedmont: Barbera, Freisa, Grignolino, Dolcetto, Moscato, Cortese and Ruchè.

Twenty barrels in the older cellar

Garrone keeps two cellars with different jobs. The older aging cellar, built around 1920 by Evasio Garrone, holds twenty oak barrels from 2,000 to 5,000 litres, including one barrel of 130 years. A later cellar, built around 1975, handles preparation and bottling. That separation gives the place a clear cellar logic: élevage in the old room, finishing in the working one. The vineyards are farmed with the lowest possible impact on the environment, with particular attention to soil condition, though the house does not claim an organic or biodynamic certification. Harvest remains manual. In the cellar, the winemaking begins with selected yeasts, and maceration changes according to wine type. Some wines stay in steel, some in wood, each vessel chosen for the expression the estate wants to hold. The scale remains small enough to read as family work: roughly eighty thousand litres in the most favourable years, not an industrial figure disguised as craft.

Barbera, Ruchè and the Monferrato frame

The portfolio stays close to the hills around the cellar. Barbera appears in several forms, including Barbera d’Asti DOCG, Barbera d’Asti DOCG Superiore and Barbera del Monferrato DOC. The range also includes Freisa d’Asti DOC, Grignolino d’Asti DOC, Monferrato DOC Dolcetto, Moscato d’Asti DOCG, Piemonte DOC Cortese and Ruchè di Castagnole Monferrato DOCG. The house also lists Grappa di Grignolino and Grappa di Ruchè, extending the same regional grammar into distillation. This is not a cellar built around international breadth. It is a cellar built around the names that belong here, with Barbera and Ruchè carrying much of the local force. The Superiore designation gives one visible tier within the Barbera d’Asti DOCG work, while the Ruchè connects the estate to Castagnole Monferrato, one of its vineyard addresses. The method stays legible because the range does.

The room keeps the old work close

The older cellar gives Garrone its register: oak, stone, scale measured by barrels rather than spectacle. In the village of Grana, the winery sits as a working family house, not a detached tasting set. The atmosphere is rustic and conversational, with the cellar itself doing much of the explaining. Bottles from the regional range carry the place outward, but the room pulls the work back to its sources: the hand harvest, the selected fermentations, the separation between aging and bottling, the family line from Evasio to Luigi to Marco and Dante. If the next movement here is quiet, it is the same one the estate has already chosen: another vintage carried through the 1920 cellar, under the gaze of the 130-year-old barrel.