When Gianluca Viberti was in winemaking school, aged 18, he listened to a lecture given by a visiting Champagne producer. “You guys here have beautiful red wines,” said the producer. “But we have Champagne.” He then posed a question: “Do you know the difference between Champagne and Barolo?” The answer, he said, was that you could drink Champagne 24 hours a day, where you couldn’t with Barolo.

“Damn,” thought Viberti to himself. “That’s true.” And he decided that, one day, he would make his own sparkling wine. The opportunity came in 2010 when he moved into his own winery, 460 Casina Bric in Barolo, and started experimenting with sparkling Nebbiolo. “If you look back at our Piedmont history, they’d already produced a spumante with Nebbiolo back in the eighteenth century,” he says. “I started experimenting in 2010 and 2011 and then I put it on the market in 2013.”