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Cantrina Ventennale

Cantrina, a 20-year-old taste

posted on 13 June 2019
After numerous seasons marked by a warm spring that was so early that it brought budbreak significantly forward, we are finally seeing a textbook spring. In fact, after a particularly dry, not very cold winter, April ushered in a long, cool, rainy period that considerably slowed down vine growth, so much so that flowering occurred some two weeks later than the previous season. Overall, the outlook is positive, though, and predictions at this point, if there are no surprises!, are for a harvest kickoff no earlier than the first days of September, even for the early-ripening varieties.Of course, the high humidity of the past months and the frequent rains have presented an additional challenge for growers like ourselves, since we farm organically, but the expertise that we have built up over the five years that we have followed this philosophy have enabled us to manage the vineyards in the best possible fashion. We will shortly be finishing our green pruning (selecting the most promising buds, thinning and tying up the shoots, leaf-pulling), and next month we will, if necessary, reduce the number of clusters for optimal development of the remaining ones.With regard to the wines, we are just about to bottle Riné 2018, Zerdì 2017, and Groppello 2018, all of them certified organic.
20th milestone:
On 13 May, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of our winery with a vertical tasting showcasing the three wines that, from our founding to the present, have become iconic. We selected the vintages of each that are most representative of the evolution of the blends, production methods, and ageing.
The years tasted are:

- Riné (1999, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2013, 2017)
- Nepomuceno (1999, 2001, 2005, 2007, 2011, 2015)
- Sole di Dario (1999, 2001, 2006, 2009, 2012)

It was truly exciting to re-taste the 1999 wines. We knew, of course, that we were producing age-worthy wines, but we didn’t know that that could be so surprising—so crisp, complex, and intriguing, as only a well-matured wine can be….
Have a look to our gallery 20th milestone.

Harvest over–a great vintage?

posted on 12 October 2015
Our harvest is complete this year too, and we brought home the fruits of an entire year’s hard work in the vineyards. As always, this is also the time for observations and predictions, with everyone expressing an opinion on the overall quality of the vintage: stars, glasses, clusters, etc. are being generously spread over the season. One thing is sure, though, and that is that the climate is changing, and that will certainly impact our work, which is in large part intimately connected to what nature offers us. We will have to get used to weather marked by extremes: the present 2015, in fact, compared to the cold, rainy 2014, is precisely the opposite. But we all know that extremes do not always make for good balance!

Befana 2015

posted on 6 January 2015
Warm wishes to all from the Befana!!! As always, we like to wait until the beginning of the new year to send everyone our best wishes for the holidays just past and our hopes that the new year will start off in the best way possible. Looking a bit down the road, and at our own life here, we are hopeful that 2015 will be a terrific growing year–and, who knows, perhaps even a great vintage! OK, maybe I’m going a little too fast here, or even just dreaming… so it’s best that I let you know what’s been happening with Cantrina.

2014 harvest… totally difficult, but not impossible

posted on 21 October 2014
The factors that characterised this growing season were huge amounts of rain, low average temperatures, little sun, and a summer that we saw only for brief moments. These conditions created a host of problems, with the grapes struggling to achieve ripeness and various fungal attacks, affecting both clusters and leaves. As a consequence, the picking went much more slowly than usual, and the crop was much lighter, in particular because we had to perform a very painstaking quality-selection of the grapes on the vine, since we want to vinify only the finest-quality clusters, the ripest and healthiest. We will now need to dedicate much more attention to the new wines in order to ensure good-quality final versions. But we are convinced that they will bring us unexpected...
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