Booze has long held a reputation for its ability to make people cry. While this age-old stereotype is often reserved for – but not unique to – someone that has had a few too many gins at a party and ended up in a flood of tears in the kitchen or weeping on the stairs, it’s not often that alcohol can bring a group of people to tears before even a sip has passed their lips. This isn’t the case for the wine of Cantina Romanese, for this is a winery with a unique story, one that is, in turn, both heart-breaking and heart-warming in equal measure. As Giorgio Romanese regales us with his winery’s history, there isn’t a dry eye around the table.
Sitting high on the sun-kissed and picturesque slopes above the picture-postcard town of Levico Terme, grapes have been grown on the site of Cantina Romanese since 1996, when the father of the current owners, Paolo, acquired the fields once he retired and began planting the vineyards. Despite cultivating a fantastic crop, he never ventured into making wine for himself, instead choosing to sell the grapes to some of the larger vineyards 20km from his property.
“We wanted to Vaolrize the grapes and continue the work of our father. For that, we started to make our own wines.”
It wasn’t until 10 years ago, when Paolo passed away, that the two brothers Andrea and Giorgio Romanese, took over their father’s vineyard and began to produce wine for themselves. According to them, they wanted to valorize the grapes, use them to continue their fathers work and produce something themselves, rather than selling their crop to nearby winemakers. Cantina Romanese now produces 6 different varieties of wine with each label designed and drawn by a local artist: 2 whites (a Chardonnay and aromatic Müller-Thurgau named Fides and Laetitia respectively); a red named Narciso that is very typical of the region; a Rose, named Gabriella in honour of their late mother; and two sparkling wines, one of which is very unique.
So ubiquitous is Italy’s more famous sparkling wine, prosecco, that many people are not aware of Trentodoc, a type of sparkling wine unique to the Trentino region of the country. First produced in the early 1900s by Giulio Ferrari, an oenologist at the San Michele all’Adige Agrarian Institute who discovered that the growing conditions in the French Champagne producing village of Épernay were staggeringly similar to is home of Trentino, he brought chardonnay grapes back to Italy with him and began to experiment.
Now, Trentodoc wines are, like the French sparklers, made primarily with Chardonnay and Pinot Noir; Meunier and Pinot Blanc are allowed by regulations but are not as prevalent in wines. They must be grown in a well-defined area within the Province of Trento. It’s thought that the area’s unique geography, which benefits from high altitudes (apparently the highest known vineyards in the world), proximity to the sea, chalky and mineral-rich soil, as well as the temperature, which is similar to that in Reims, France, where Champagne is produced, all contribute to producing an elegant wine, one that has more in common with champagne than prosecco.
It’s also made differently to prosecco, using the ‘Metodo Classico’, which is the same method used to make champagne. It’s a slow, difficult process, but helps to add tiny and delicate bubbles to differentiate Trentodoc from other Italian sparkling wines.
However, Cantina Romanese takes this one step further in the production of their Lagorai Trentodoc to create something very special and unique. Bottles with an iron lock, rather than a cork, placed in an iron lattice containing 500 bottles and then sunk 20m to the bottom of Levico Lake where they are left for over 2 years to age. This way, the wine is kept at a constant ambience of 8°C all year, no matter if the surface of the lake is frozen in winter, or 35 °C in the height of summer. They produce just 2016 bottles of Lagorai every two years.
The idea of sinking the bottles came to Andrea and Giorgio Romanese when they heard of researchers discovering 186 bottles of champagne in a Baltic freighter that had sunk around 1840. Due to the champagne bottles in the Baltic Sea wreck being stored under near-perfect conditions (it was cool, dark and the bottles were level), they were still drinkable despite being underwater for over 150 years.
Once the wine has finished resting on the lake bed, the bottles are retrieved, and the wine is taken up high above Levico to a World War I fortress, Colle delle Benne, where it is stored and the next phase, the rumage, can begin. The bottles are laid almost horizontal in the stone fortress and gradually, over the course of numerous weeks, rotated each day by a tenth by the Remueur and inclined slightly more. By the end of the process, the bottles have been completed several full rotations and are left upside down, leaving the clear wine on top and a yeast plug settled in the neck. Finally, the stopper and yeast plug is removed, and the wine can be corked.
There are only a handful of winemakers around the world that use this underwater ageing process, usually in seawater, and Cantina Romanese is the only one in Italy to do so.
it’s a little unclear what effect, if any, underwater ageing has on the finished wine. It is thought that wine aged underwater has an accelerated ageing effect when compared with land-aged wines, giving it more complexity, with more tannins. However, producers of sparkling wines have claimed many positive effects, such as the wines having more interesting non-fruit, earthy notes. Either way, whether or not consumers notice a difference in taste, it adds a unique element to Lagorai. In the end, the act of ageing it underwater didn’t really matter to the wine itself. It had merit on its own, it was always going to be delicious, but knowing the long and intricate process in which the wine is produced changes the way we perceived it and gives the wine an interesting story.
It is Cantina Romanese’s story that really sets them apart. Sitting beneath a canopy beside the faded pastel grandeur of the winery just as the last light of day is fading, the wind gently flowing through the verdant fields of vines and crickets just beginning their evening chorus, Giorgio holds up our final bottle of the evening, a rose named Gabriella, after his late mother.
While most of their wines have labels designed by local artists, Giorgio designed the label for Gabriella himself. It depicts a simple, artistic outline of his mother’s face. He passes it around our group and one by one we run our fingers over the surface. Each line, her eyes, her nose, her mouth, are all embossed so that anyone drinking the wine can feel his mother. Giorgio explains that, due to an injury sustained during the war, his grandfather lost his sight at the age of 25. He never got to see what his daughter looked like.
With this small gesture of embossing the label, Giorgio likes to dedicate this very special wine to the memories of both his mother and his grandfather. By the time he has finished his story, tears are trickling down the cheeks of each member of our group, and it certainly isn’t due to the alcohol, but rather the winery’s history. In the end, it doesn’t matter how great the wine is – and in Cantina Romanese’s case it is very good – it is the story behind the wine that makes this such a memorable evening.
My visit to Cantina Romanese was facilitated by Visit Trentino and Visit Valsugana, however, all views expressed are my own
