Between the great wines.

The Monferrato hills sit between two of Italy's greatest wine zones. Barolo and Barbaresco are an hour south in the Langhe; Alba — the white truffle capital of Piedmont — is forty minutes by car. Asti, with its medieval Palio, is twenty minutes away.

Canelli, whose underground wine cellars are among the most atmospheric spaces in northern Italy, is twenty minutes. The Langhe hills are home to Barolo and Barbaresco; Alba is worth the trip in October for the white truffle fair.

In June 2014, UNESCO inscribed the Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero and Monferrato — Italy's fiftieth World Heritage site, and its first cultural vineyard landscape. Six components were included: the Langa of Barolo, the Castle of Grinzane Cavour, the hills of Barbaresco, Nizza Monferrato and Barbera, the cellars of Canelli, and the infernot of the Monferrato.

Agliano sits inside the fourth — Nizza Monferrato and Barbera — not next to it. The hills outside the windows are part of the inscription. The protection is for the cultural landscape: the way these slopes have been worked over centuries. It is not for the wines themselves; those are protected separately.

Forty minutes south of here, the Tanaro river runs east-to-west and divides the wine country in two. South of the river: the Langhe, where Barolo and Barbaresco are made. North of the river: the Roero, where the same Nebbiolo grape is grown on sandier, more friable soils. The wines are different.

Roero Nebbiolo tends to be lighter, more aromatic, earlier-drinking — a half-day before lunch in Canale, rather than a serious afternoon in Serralunga. The Roero is also the only place that grows Arneis at scale: the white wine you'll see on tables across Piedmont in summer. The river is a useful piece of geography to know.

Through the 1980s and 90s the producers of the Langhe argued, publicly and at length, about how to make Barolo. The traditionalists kept long submerged-cap macerations and large old Slavonian botti, the way the Mascarello and Rinaldi families had done for generations. The modernists — led by Elio Altare, who took a chainsaw to his father's old casks in 1983 — shortened macerations and aged the wine in new French barriques.

By the late 2000s the line had blurred: most modernists pulled back on new oak, most traditionalists adopted cleaner cellar work. The argument settled into a question about site, vintage, and restraint. A bottle of Bartolo Mascarello next to a bottle of Elio Altare, from the same vintage, will still tell you most of what you need to know.

Twelve kilometres from here, in the cellars under Canelli, Carlo Gancia made the first Asti spumante in 1865. The cellars he and his successors dug into the local sandstone — Contratto, Bosca, Coppo, Gancia — run for kilometres, hold a steady twelve degrees year-round, and were inscribed as part of the same UNESCO listing.

The everyday Asti and Moscato d'Asti come from these cellars. So does Alta Langa, the metodo classico answer to Champagne — Pinot Nero and Chardonnay grown in the southern Langhe, kept on the lees for at least thirty months. Three sparkling traditions in roughly thirty kilometres of road.