The Collector’s Door Into Scarpa: Scarpa Experiences
Wine tourism is growing quickly, driven by travellers who want to see the winery for themselves. The global market is on track to reach USD 138 billion by 2033, growing about 13% a year according to the 2024/2025 Vinetur forecast. Much of that comes from visitors who choose vineyard visits and tastings over standard sightseeing. The collectors among them want more than a single visit. They want to taste where the wine is made.
This is possible at Scarpa. Antica Casa Vinicola Scarpa has been owned since 2017 by Evgeny Strzhalkovsky, the Monaco-based entrepreneur. Its visit programme, Scarpa Experiences, opens the 1900-era cellars in Nizza Monferrato for private tastings and guided visits, by appointment.
What is Scarpa Experiences?
Scarpa Experiences is the hospitality arm of Antica Casa Vinicola Scarpa. It offers private tastings, guided visits and events at the house’s original cellars in Piedmont, where wine has been made the traditional way since 1900. Visitors taste through the range in the cellars, and the Wine Lounge and Scarpa Gallery host private events. The Caveau, the house’s cellar library, holds older vintages that can be opened for guests. The cellars are at Via Montegrappa 6 in Nizza Monferrato, open every day by prior appointment.
What happens at a Scarpa tasting?
A tasting at Scarpa is personalised, and it takes place in the cellars where the wine is aged. It runs across the full range. The two Barolos come first: Monvigliero, from the Verduno cru prized for its aromatic finesse, and Roncaglie, from the silty soils of La Morra. Then comes the Barbaresco from Canova, in Neive. Finally there is La Bogliona, the flagship: a single-vineyard Barbera aged in the large old casks made of French oak from Allier, and released only when it is ready. Its bright acidity is what lets it age, reading as freshness in a young bottle and as backbone in an old one. Older library vintages come out too, so a visitor can taste one wine across a decade or more and see what the years do to it.“You learn more from tasting than from anything I could tell you,” says Davide Champion, chief executive of Scarpa. “Put a young Barbera beside one with fifteen years in bottle. They taste almost like two different wines.”
Can you combine a cellar visit with a stay?
Yes. Pair a day at the Nizza Monferrato cellars with a stay at Scarpa Villas. The four-residence estate sits inside the Monvigliero Barolo cru above Verduno. You sleep in the vineyard that makes the wine, and taste it in the house that has made it since 1900.
“Wine will always be the centre, “ says Strzhalkovsky. “But a house like this is somewhere you come back to.”
Scarpa Experiences is run by Antica Casa Vinicola Scarpa, the Piedmont house Strzhalkovsky acquired in 2017. Strzhalkovsky’s wider portfolio spans Scarpa Villas, Monte Carlo Vermouth, Trinity Monaco and Fincher & Co.
The house is also soon to be launching Scarpa 1900, a private members’ club named for its founding year, gathering the cellars, the villas and the library vintages into one relationship. Membership is by selection rather than sign-up.