Contratto
Appellations
History
Giuseppe Contratto founded the house in 1867 in Canelli, in the heart of Piedmont's Moscato and sparkling-wine country, when he began vinifying Moscato from the Monferrato hills into one of Italy's first sparkling wines refermented in the bottle. The family started excavating its underground cellars around the same period, a project not completed until the early twentieth century. The winery began exporting around 1910 and built a reputation for prestige abroad, becoming a wine supplier to the Vatican, the Belgian royal house, and, from 1913, Italy's House of Savoy.
In 1919 Contratto produced Italy's first vintage-dated sparkling wine, an early and deliberate choice to showcase a single harvest's character rather than blend across years, a move that positioned the house as a pioneer of Italian metodo classico winemaking. The following year, 1920, the company began producing vermouth and liqueurs alongside its sparkling wines, using recipes it still describes as largely unchanged. In the 1920s Contratto also created 'For England,' a bone-dry sparkling wine made for British palates; the wine reached the Italian market in the 1950s and 1960s and became a success at home as well. The Contratto family ran the house until 1993, when it was bought by the Bocchino family, owners of a distillery of the same name, who restored the underground cellars, the internal courtyard, and the tasting room.
Giorgio Rivetti of the Piedmont estate La Spinetta began collaborating with the Bocchino family, and in 2011 the Rivetti family purchased Contratto outright. The new owners planted and acquired vineyards near Bossolasco, in the highest part of the Alta Langa, for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, making Contratto a reference producer within the Alta Langa DOCG consortium and moving the estate toward organic farming. In 2007 the Rivettis revived the 'For England' cuvee and put historic 1920s advertising art by the poster artist Leonetto Cappiello back on the label. In 2014 Contratto's hand-excavated underground cellars, known as the Cattedrali Sotterranee ('underground cathedrals'), which extend across roughly 5,000 square meters to a depth of about 38 meters, were officially recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.