Way up high in the northern corner of Italy lies the city of Bolzano, a place where Latin and Germanic cultures collide (peacefully! Italian and German-speakers happily live side by side). This is the crossroads... Read More

Way up high in the northern corner of Italy lies the city of Bolzano, a place where Latin and Germanic cultures collide (peacefully! Italian and German-speakers happily live side by side). This is the crossroads of the Trentino-Alto Adige wine region of Italy. Leave this city in any direction, and you will come across vineyards, but depending on which way you go, the grape varieties, the terroirs and the wine cultures and traditions will all be different. 

Today, we will follow the Adige river out of Bolzano upriver (to the northwest) into an area known as Terlano. Here we are far from the olive groves of Tuscany or Crete, and yet this is one of the oldest wine regions in the world. Archaeologists have found early iron-age tools here dating from long before the Romans showed up that were clearly used to prune vines.

Here, we are practically in the alps, and the complex topography – mountain tops, glacial deposits, steep valleys and the like – are not really conducive to large-scale agriculture. Instead you have small holdings by tiny producers. Lacking the economies of scale necessary to efficiently produce wine, they formed a cooperative back in the 1890s. Today, the Cantina di Terlano makes some of the very best wines of the region, and some of the best white wines from all of Italy. Like the great Produttori of Barbaresco, this Cantina is the jewel of its wine region.

The Cantina’s members’ holdings sprawl up a mountain, Monte Tschoggl, with apples growing on the lower slopes and grapes, mostly white wine grapes, further up. The volcanic soils filled with crystals, minerals and other glacial deposits produce distinctive, highly mineral and saline white wines.