A Vineyard Retreat in the Heart of the Langhe

Why the Langhe is Italy's serious wine country

Italy has several great wine regions. The Langhe is the one where wine is treated less as a tourist product and more as a craft. The hills southeast of Alba produce Barolo and Barbaresco — two of the most respected red wines in the world — alongside Dolcetto, Barbera, Nebbiolo d'Alba and, in the Alta Langa zone where Villa Sorì sits, the Alta Langa DOCG sparkling and Moscato d'Asti.

The whole landscape is UNESCO World Heritage. That status is rare for a working agricultural region. It means the vineyards, the stone hamlets, the cellars and the way the land is shaped have all been recognised as a single cultural object worth preserving.

The vineyards around Villa Sorì

The house is surrounded by working vineyards on three sides — Moscato and Dolcetto immediately around it, Barbera and Nebbiolo on the slopes opposite. From the terrace you look down on a small valley of vines, and across to the next hill where the next village sits.

The closest cellars are within walking distance. Larger producers — the well-known names in Barolo and Barbaresco — are a thirty-to-fifty-minute drive. The smaller, more interesting growers are closer. We point you toward the ones we actually drink ourselves.

Wine experiences we organise for guests

We don't run group tours. We arrange private visits to the producers we trust, at the times you want, in groups of two to six. A typical wine day looks like this: a morning visit to a small Barolo producer (one hour, four wines, no rush), lunch at a trattoria in the village, an afternoon at a Barbaresco cellar, return to Villa Sorì for a sauna and an evening at the house.

Other formats: a vineyard walk with a local agronomist, a vertical tasting of one producer's last ten vintages, a private dinner at the house cooked by a chef around four wines you chose that morning, a half-day visit to the Alta Langa sparkling-wine cooperative ten minutes away.

Harvest and the vendemmia

The vendemmia — harvest — runs from late August (Moscato, Pinot Nero for sparkling) through September (Dolcetto, Barbera) into the first half of October (Nebbiolo for Barolo). Staying in the Langhe during the vendemmia is the closest experience there is to being inside the wine: tractors on every road, baskets of grapes outside every cellar, the smell of fermentation drifting out of the village.

Book early for September — both Villa Sorì and the cellars get tight in harvest weeks.

A house for people who actually like wine

Villa Sorì has the things wine travellers tend to ask for: a long stone table outdoors for lunch, a fireplace for slow autumn evenings, decanters and proper glassware, a fridge cold enough for whites and sparkling, a wine cellar nook for what you buy that day. The grocery in Cessole stocks the local producers; what you can't find there, we can.