Cantina Bolzano has a new home

Cantina Bolzano inaugurated its new winemaking complex in the Alto Adige capital with two days of events and tastings for the press and local authorities.

The first brick was laid in 2015 and by the end of the summer of 2018 the first grapes arrived to the new winery. The timed needed to finish the harvest, make the wine and take care of a few details, and the cooperative’s new headquarters was ready for its debut in society. Its “debutant ball” was held last April 5, when the doors to the new structure were opened to the press, leading clients and local authorities with two days of events and tastings, including an interesting vertical tasting of Lagrein Riserva Taber (subject of tomorrow’s article).

It is an imposing structure but one that does not impact the landscape nor environment, thanks to the adoption of the modern principles of sustainability and functionality in the project. These allowed it to become the first cooperative winery to receive CasaClimaWine® (HouseClimateWine) certification. It is located in the San Maurizio district, just outside the Bolzano city limits. A new winery was needed because, according to general manager Klaus Sparer and enologist Stephan Filippi, it was getting to complicated to process harvests at the old winery situated in the city center, which was also creating problems for residents there. Another factor was the need to have a headquarters that finally offered a unique image for the new “work group” created by the merger, in 2001, between the small Santa Maddalena cooperative and the original Cantina Bolzano cooperative, founded in Gries in 1908. Since the beginning of the new millennium, the new reality has continued to expand and today has 220 partners for a total of 340 hectares of vineyards that produce three million hectoliters of wine a year.

The new complex has a total of 16,000 square meters of space, distributed in five levels within an area of two hectares of land. Thus there is sufficient pace to further expand. “Having the opportunity to start from scratch,” explained enologist Filippi, “we decided to build bigger than we needed. Nevertheless, our goal is to expand not so much in terms of quantity as improving quality through better organization in all phases of production, from the consignment of grapes to bottling”.

The whole structure located on the side of a hill and develops underground, which allows for natural climate control, easier movement of vehicles and grapes and musts within the wine complex. Gravity is exploited in processing the grapes that are unloaded from bins at the top of the winery. The stainless steel vats allow for separately storing the musts from each zone of cultivation, thus increasing the possibility to produce cru wines, something that was begun in 1988 with the Progetto Qualità. These are located on the middle levels along with the bottling operations, while the lower levels house the large vats and barrels for maturing the wine.

Not only is the new structure more functional, it also finally allows the cooperative to offer hospitality, with a vast reception hall at the top, inside a central, stainless steel prism. The outside has holes to let the light in and is scored to recreate the veins of a grape leaf. On the ground floor are the tasting areas and retail shops.

The “roof” of the winery is covered by a vineyard that which has just been planted with grapes that will not be used to make wine. The varietal cultivated is Cabernet Cortis, a PIWI varietal that underscores the cooperative’s increasing interest, as well as that of the whole Alto Adige area (as exemplified by the XXX eXplore- eXperiment-eXclusive experiments carried out by Kellerei and Kellermeister Andrea Moser), in varietals resistant to cryptogam which could represent, in a not-too-distant future, a new foundation for Italian winemaking.

Related Products

Related Articles