Cascine Elena
Piemonte, Alta Langa, Italy
 

Cascina Elena began in 2020, when a Roman winemaker, Filippo, who'd cut his teeth in the hills of Tuscany, met Peter and Elaine, a couple from New York, and the three decided to build something together in the Alta Langa.
 

They're based in Rocchetta Belbo, farming around 4 hectares of vines carved into natural terraces and held up by dry stone walls the team has worked hard to keep intact. The vineyards sit high, between 480 and 530 metres above sea level, on soil rich in marl and limestone with less clay than the wines of the Langa proper, surrounded by forest that shelters the vines and keeps the local biodiversity thriving.
 

Farming is organic, in conversion, with most of the work done by hand across small, scattered plots. In the cellar there's no fixed recipe, each vintage is left to guide the winemaking rather than the other way around: spontaneous fermentation, ageing in steel, terracotta and wood, no fining and no filtration.
 

Even the winery building follows the same principle, an award-winning, eco-built structure made from recyclable steel and local terracotta, insulated naturally and running on solar power, built to sit as lightly as possible on the landscape around it.