Oddero

The Oddero family has been making wine in La Morra since the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, with Giovanni Battista (1794-1874) and his sons Lorenzo (1821-1903) and Luigi (1832-1893). The date the house treats as its founding is 1878: the year the first Giacomo Oddero (1851-1915) began selling the wine in bottle rather than in bulk.

The figure who explains the estate's weight in the Langhe is his great-grandson, Giacomo Oddero, born in 1926. He was provincial Assessor of Agriculture and signed a good share of the disciplinari that gave the wines of Langhe and Roero first their DOC and later their DOCG status. In 1997 he also founded the National Centre for Alba Truffle Studies. In other words: an estate whose patriarch helped write the rules of its own appellations.

Today it is run by his daughters Mariacristina and Mariavittoria —the first joined the company in the late 1990s— and Isabella and Pietro, the seventh generation, are already in.

The holdings are some 32 hectares of vines and another five of hazelnut trees, spread across many of Piedmont's great crus: Bussia in Monforte d'Alba, Brunate in La Morra, Vignarionda in Serralunga d'Alba, Villero and Rocche di Castiglione in Castiglione Falletto, Monvigliero in Verduno, Gallina in Neive and Nizza in Asti.