Officina Battaglin has today announced its first foray into the gravel market in the form of the Portofino G, a custom steel bike with oversized lugs and a special-looking ‘cromovelato’ paint finish.
The Italian brand was founded by former Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España winner Giovanni Battaglin and his son Alex. It specialises in high-end custom steel bikes and has redesigned its road-going Portofino R road model to create the gravel-going Portofino G.
According to the brand’s CEO, Alex Battaglin, the brand wanted to take the comfort of the roadgoing Portofino and transfer it to a gravel platform.
“If there’s one thing the Portofino is renowned for, it’s the supreme riding comfort,” Battaglin claimed. “Reimagining it as a gravel machine that would bring this smooth ride on unforgiving roads had always seemed like the natural evolution.”
The Portofino G might use the roadgoing Portofino R as a starting point design-wise, but it will feature a custom steel frame featuring a newly-designed Columbus steel down tube and completely redesigned head tube lugs. The lugs are finished in polished steel, of course, and the frame is topped off with a carbon fibre fork, a 68mm T47 bottom bracket and completely integrated internal cabling.
The bike may be new, but Battaglin looked back to the custom geometries it created for professional riders tackling Paris-Roubaix in the ’80s and ’90s to inform the Portofino G’s geometry.
“We felt like a proper gravel version of the Portofino had to maintain the company’s distinct road racing DNA,” Battaglin continued. “We went back to the closest thing to gravel racing our company had done: the custom bikes we developed for pro riders in the late ’80s and early ’90s for the Paris-Roubaix. At the time, the Paris-Roubaix was the professional competition that brought lugged steel bikes to be raced on unpaved roads. Those geometries were the starting point for developing a gravel-specific frame geometry.”
Naturally, then, the Portofino G will be a more road-focused gravel bike, with sharper handling characteristics, as well as 40mm tyre clearance; more commonly found on ‘all road’ bikes such as the Ridley Grifn.
“We didn’t want a bike that resembled a drop-bar mountain bike, or a relaxed geometry for bikepacking. We wanted a gravel…
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