Few places on earth are as fertile as Italy.
From Puglia to Piedmont, the land unfolds in a sweep of green and gold. Fields of wheat roll like waves toward the horizon. Plump red tomatoes thrive in the shadows of volcanoes, and olive trees line the electric-blue coasts of summer dreams. Even the Alpine and Apennine forests offer a bounty of wild herbs and vegetables practically unrivaled in Europe.
Figs, fennel, chestnuts, capers, citrus, berries, barley—almost everything grows here. Yet no crop is as venerated as the grape.
“There’s fruit, and then there are grapes,” says Gianriccardo Corbo. “We don’t think about them as food. In Italy, we make wine with grapes.”
That’s been true since Roman times, when the empire’s thirstiest soldiers and settlers planted vines across the conquered territories to keep their cups from running dry. Even today, Italy remains the world’s largest wine producer.
But Corbo sees the fruit differently. In the past 20 years, few people—if any—have done more to draw attention to the importance of grapes to Italian beer.
Defining an Italian Style
A pharmaceutical worker and Italy’s first BJCP-certified judge, Corbo is widely credited with establishing Italian grape ale as an official beer style.
At a BJCP meeting in Dublin in 2013, he pitched the board on officially recognizing the style, sometimes abbreviated as IGA. To make his case, he brought as many bottles from Italy as he could carry. His sales pitch worked. Two years later, the BJCP included the style definition he had written in its 2015 guidelines. “I had the feeling that if I didn’t do it,” he says, “the style wouldn’t belong to Italy.”
Today, many brewers outside Italy simply call the style “grape ale.” But to many Italian brewers, the IGA designation remains important.
“The name doesn’t stand for the grape variety,” Corbo says. “It stands for the fact it started in Italy and represents the way Italians do it.”
At its simplest, an IGA is exactly what the name suggests: a beer made with grapes. It must be brewed and not blended with wine. Beyond that, “it’s a really wide style,” Corbo says.
The brewer can add the red or white grapes—whether whole, must, pomace, or juice—to the boil or during fermentation. The grape character can be subtle or strong. “The percentage of must in the recipe normally isn’t less than 20 percent, but it can be up to 50 percent,” Corbo says.
Most brewers use pilsner or other pale base malts, neutral ale yeast, and low-alpha hops such as Saaz to keep the grape front and center. Beyond that, the beer might be light or strong; it might get wine yeast, a mixed culture, or even spontaneous in place of an ale strain; and it might age in oak, or not.
The one through line is that the grape forms the foundation of the beer’s flavor. The hops, yeast, funk, oak, or other character shouldn’t overwhelm the fruit.
Sardinian Sapa and the Birth of a Style
One of the first Italian brewers to explore these ideas was Nicola Perra, a Sardinian who began experimenting with sapa in the early 2000s.
Sapa, also known as saba, is a syrup made by slowly boiling grape must until it reduces to a third of its original volume. The syrup dates to Roman times, when people used it to sweeten food and weak wine, and Italians still use it today.
“In those years, my family still had vineyards,” Perra says. “At the end of the harvest, we would collect the bunches left here and there on the vines and make sapa. It’s always been a popular product in traditional Sardinian pastry-making.”
Since 2005, Perra has brewed a range of IGAs alongside core beers at his brewery, Barley Craft Brewery, in the city of Cagliari. He started with the island’s white-grape varieties, but his first and most famous IGA remains an outlier: BB10, an imperial stout made with red Cannonau must.
“I had no precedent, no literature to draw on,” he says. “So, not only did I think this was something new, but I also thought there was a whole new world of brewing to explore.”
His intuition would prove correct. Around the time he released his BB10, breweries elsewhere began unveiling their own IGAs. Birra del Borgo in Borgorose brewed a few different high-ABV IGAs with the must of Sangiovese, Malvasia, and Duchessa grapes. Loverbeer in Marentino, near Turin, made another with Barbera must.
Later, after the style appeared in the BJCP guidelines, there was an explosion of IGAs, Corbo says. “It was like a bomb. We had hundreds and hundreds of different IGAs.”
The dust has since settled. These days, brewers are following the guidelines and making better, more expressive beers, he says. But they’re still probing the style’s possibilities.
Even Perra has continued to tinker. “About 10 years ago, I launched a new line of IGAs, using only fresh must from aromatic and semiaromatic grapes,” he says. “The focus is on fresher beers, usually with lower alcohol levels. It’s been really satisfying.”
Terroir in the Field of Beer
Today, some of the more distinctive entries in the grape-ale canon come from breweries that rely almost entirely on homegrown ingredients.
In San Gimignano, Tuscany, Cantina Errante describes itself as a living organism, producing wild beers rather than IGAs. Yet their work hints at another direction the style could take.
One of just four Italian breweries with a coolship (by their own estimate), Cantina Errante specializes in spontaneous and mixed-culture fermentations. Their grain comes from nearby wheat fields, where farmers sow thousands of heritage varieties and let the climate decide which ones grow each season. They ferment with whatever is fresh and in season, whether that’s Tuscany’s Sangiovese grapes or wild carrot flowers and sorrel.
“We’re very proud to know that our beers are an exact expression of where we are,” says brewer Marco Benda. “Not just the weather or the raw ingredients, but also the ideas.”
In the Veneto region, Birrificio Sorio has carved out its own place in the IGA canon.
The brewery is run by Mirko Boggian and Giacomo Maule, two brewers with agricultural backgrounds. Boggian grew up around cattle and dairy farms, while Maule’s family runs La Biancara, one of Italy’s pioneering natural wineries. When they opened Sorio in 2021, they committed to producing as many of their ingredients as possible themselves.
They grow their own grains, rotating spelt and oats on one two-and-a-half-acre plot, and wheat, which they send to a maltster in Austria. They cultivate Comet, Mount Hood, and Perle hops, then have them pelleted at Luppoleto della Val d’Alpone, 20 minutes away. Whatever hops they can’t grow, they purchase from other Italian farms.
And for their IGAs, they use the Garganega, Tai Rossa, and Merlot must from La Biancara.
“In Italy, we think we have the best ingredients in the world,” Boggian says. “But it’s not always true.” What matters more, he says, is identity. “If you make beer with American hops, English barley, and German malt, you can make that beer anywhere in the world.”
That philosophy is at the heart of their grape ales. Their Gargan-IGA is a gose-IGA hybrid made with Garganega must. The grapes are intensely aromatic, Boggian says, so they add salt to amplify the aromas and echo the mineral volcanic soils where the vines grow.
Another IGA, Garganensis, takes a different approach. Fermentation begins with wine yeast from the grape must before they add the beer wort. “It’s the same ingredients [as Gargan-IGA] but a completely different fermentation,” Boggian says.
Working with the grapes is rarely straightforward, he says. “It’s not easy to understand how they will impact the beer.” Years spent working the land, however, help them anticipate what each harvest will bring, from the year’s rainfall to its sunshine. “We’re brewers now,” says Boggian, “but at the bottom of our souls, we’re farmers.”
That grounding in the local soil has helped them make IGAs that could only come from Veneto—a true expression of terroir.
And to Corbo, that points toward something Italian brewers have only begun to explore.
“If we brew with local ingredients, we can define a real Italian identity,” he says. “Otherwise, whatever we make is the same as brewed in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, or Spain. We have maybe the greatest agricultural variety in the entire world, and we’re not taking advantage of it.
“There’s a lot to do.”