Ortrugo

Ortrugo is a white grape of the Colli Piacentini, the hills south of Piacenza where Emilia meets Lombardy and the Apennines begin. It was for a long time a blending grape, added to Malvasia to lift acidity and dilute that variety's insistent perfume, and the name itself may derive from a dialect phrase meaning other grape — the thing that was not the main thing.

It became a varietal wine in its own right in the 1970s, and it is now the signature white of the zone. The style is light and dry with green apple and citrus, a distinct note of bitter almond on the finish and moderate acidity. That almond bitterness is characteristic and is regarded locally as a virtue rather than a flaw; it gives the wine grip and makes it work at the table.

Most of it is frizzante — lightly sparkling, produced in tank, with a soft prickle rather than a mousse. In the Piacentino this is simply how white wine is served, alongside the same lightly fizzy reds that the region also makes, and the local cured meats provide the explanation: coppa, pancetta and salame piacentino are fatty and salty, and a cold, slightly fizzy, faintly bitter white cuts straight through them.

Still versions are made and there is a small amount of traditional-method sparkling. None of it travels far. Ortrugo is a regional wine in the strict sense — drunk where it is grown, with the food it grew up alongside — and it is rarely encountered outside northern Italy.