A generation ago, Timorasso was the sort of grape you read about as a historical footnote — if you read about it at all.

Once one of Piedmont’s most important white varieties, it nearly disappeared after phylloxera, war, rural depopulation, and the understandable preference among growers for easier, more reliable grapes like Cortese. Even the great modern books on Italian wine barely mentioned it. Timorasso had become one of those things Italy was in danger of losing forever.

But Italy has a way of rescuing its own best traditions. In the Tortona hills, a handful of stubborn growers realized that Timorasso was not merely an old grape, but a profound one: structured, mineral, savory, ageworthy, and capable of expressing Piedmont in white the way Nebbiolo expresses it in red. Claudio Mariotto was one of the key figures in that recovery. His family estate sits in Vho, near Tortona, and instead of taking the easier path, he devoted himself to the difficult local grape that almost everyone else had abandoned.

Today we have two excellent examples from Mariotto. His 2024 Derthona is the pure, immediate introduction: bright, sapid, and full of that crushed-herb and stone-fruit energy that makes Timorasso so exciting at the table.

The 2022 Pitasso is the deeper wine. Coming from one of Mariotto’s most important vineyards, and already with a couple of years of development, it shows more breadth, more golden fruit, more honeyed texture, and more of the savory, mineral backbone that explains why people now speak of Timorasso as Piedmont’s great white wine.

In a newsletter a few years back, we described Timorasso as an “heirloom” wine — like the funny-shaped tomatoes you find at the market in August, something beautiful and delicious that survived against the odds. That is still true. But the story has moved forward. Timorasso is no longer just a rescued curiosity. In the hands of Claudio Mariotto, it is one of the most compelling white wines in Italy.

Claudio Mariotto, Derthona Tortonesi Bianco, 2024 $29.99

Claudio Mariotto, Pitasso Colli Tortonesi Bianco, 2022 $49.99