Lost Traditions: Nadia Verrua
An archive interview with singular Scurzolengo (Piemonte) vigneronne Nadia Verrua, whose collaboration with her parents has brought simple, paisano winemaking to unprecedented places.
Nadia Verrua is the thoughtful public face of Cascina Tavijn, the iconic Monferrato estate that has, over the past two decades, come to symbolize, for many drinkers, both the joys and the frustrations of Piemontese natural wine. Stylish, well-priced, and brimming with vitality, Cascina Tavijn’s wines are also forthrightly “rustic,” often requiring years of bottle age before certain difficult characteristics (bitter reductions, intense volatility, mousiness) harmonize into something pleasurable. Even their instantly recognizable labels - by My Poster Sucks artist Gianluca Cannizzo - manage, in their cheerful commercial savvy, somehow to belie the idiosyncracy of the estate.
Named for the nickname of her father and grandfather - both called Ottavio - Cascina Tavijn dates to 1908, when her great-grandfather and his brother returned to their native village of Scurzolengo after earning money in canneries in Marseille. Long managed in close collaboration with her diminutive, geriatric, but apparently tireless mother and father (for whom the “Teresa” and “Ottavio” cuvées are named), Verrua has taken on a greater role in recent years, culminating in the 2025 harvest, the first conducted in the absence of Teresa, who has recently been hospitalized for health troubles.
When I first visited Verrua and her parents in autumn 2021, I arrived to a scene that seemed to explain some of the difficult phases of the estate’s wines. Verrua and her parents were devatting a foudre of destemmed ruche that had evidently been pumped into the foudre at vatting. Destemming a ripe, high-polyphenol Italian variety and then pumping the results creates a kind of high-pH grape slurry that would seem ideal for encouraging the development of precursor molecules that can lead to mousy aromas; this is a stage (during de-stemming) that many less naturally-inclined estates add sulfites to prevent this (c.f. Olek Bondonio, whose barbera destemming and vatting process I had the occasion to witness in mid-September).
I recall suggesting that manual vatting of whole cluster bunches into smaller containers might be worth trying. Teresa Verrua replied, over lunch, with a rather detailed disquisition on the diverse stem qualities of the various varieties cultivated at the estate. Her daughter professed herself curious but undecided on the issue.
Nadia Verrua’s parents are committed to winemaking habits viewed as qualitative and labor-efficient earlier in their career, when, like many small family estates in the region, they commercialized wine in glass demijohns for sale in bars in and around Torino. Nadia Verrua, for her part, has proven more committed than most of her peers in Italian natural wine circles to producing wine without filtration or sulfite addition. Cascina Tavijn’s wines have long represented - at times for better, at times for worse - this striking encounter, between simple, paisano methods and the aesthetics of the more radical echelons of the international natural wine market (as beautifully illustrated, incidentally, by Verrua’s partner Pietro Vergano’s Torino natural wine destination Consorzio).
I’d welcome further experimentation at Cascina Tavijn. But I also find that even Teresa, Nadia, and Ottavio’s more difficult wines often come around. If I was keen to revisit the estate this September, it’s partly because I recently had the occasion to recover some back-vintage wines from a former consultancy client, and they all proved rewarding. (Their 2021 “Ottavio” grignolino is singing right now, ebullient, angular, full of soul.) It’s also because I enjoy tasting wines with Verrua; like my friend and mentor of recent years, Corine Andrieu of Clos Fantine, Verrua has a broad imagination for what wine can be, and maintains a lively appreciation for the fundamental mystery of fermentation.
LOST TRADITIONS: AN INTERVIEW WITH NADIA VERRUA
The following interview was conducted in October 2021 and March 2022. It has been condensed and edited for clarity.