HOW HE GOT HERE
Alessandro Salvano grew up in Montelupo Albese, east of Serralunga d'Alba, where both his grandparents were winemakers. The land around him was Langhe through and through — blue marl soils, hillside exposures, Nebbiolo in the ground — just a few meters outside the Barolo DOCG boundary drawn in the 1980s. That detail would shape everything that came after.
He trained at the Scuola Enologica in Alba and worked at Borgogno before spending time abroad. When he returned, the question he brought back with him was pointed: why should a line on a map determine how seriously a wine is taken? In 2019 he founded Drink Wines Not Labels — a project designed to answer that question through the glass rather than through argument.
His first release, the Nebbiolo Outside, was the clearest statement of intent: a wine aged with the rigour of a traditional Barolo, from vineyards that could have been inside the zone, bottled without the name. DWNL is Alessandro's ongoing case that quality is defined by farming, method, and place — not by the denomination printed on the label.