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Ready for the new season!

posted on 20 March 2025
Warm greetings! With spring at the doors, we’re happy to send you some brief news items about what’s going on at Cantrina.

SOME NEWS FIRST ABOUT THE VINEYARDS

It’s certainly no longer novel, but we’ve had the umpteenth mild winter, an aspect of climate change that we have been seeing for years now. This year, though, conditions were unusually wet and tedious, with drizzles in autumn that lasted for months.
They didn’t harm the health of the vines, but conditions were certainly unpleasant for those in the vineyards doing the winter pruning. In a few days, finally, after two years, we will complete planting our new vineyard, on land we recently bought. We are anxiously expecting the initial crop—in harvest 2025--from the first vines planted in 2023.



SOME DEVELOPMENTS IN THE WINE DEPARTMENT

In late January, we bottled the rosés Valtènesi DOC “a rose, is a rose, is a rose” 2024, Rosanoire 2024, and Valtènesi DOC “Myroses” 2022. Among recent vintages, the 2024 is expressing itself as one of the best, in freshness, sapidity, and clean-edged aromatics. We are used to seeing a similar performance from Rosanoire , which is always quite consistent and reliable over time, but this year’s “a rose, is a rose, is a rose” DOC Valtènesi has really surprised us, in that it is the full expression of its terroir, the Valtènesi, an area renowned for rosé production. This year’s is possibly the best we have made so far. "Myroses" 2022 is a chapter in itself: a grand, elegant wine with years ahead of it, pleasurable and with loads of personality.



Many of you have been asking us when the new Cortecciowould be arriving. For those still unfamiliar with it, this is our red Pinot Nero that, in special years, we make a few bottles of and only when the wine completely satisfies our idea of what a Pinot Nero should be. Well, after months, if not years, of doubts, trials, re-thinkings and infinite tastings, we decided to bottle a few hundred bottles, fruit of a blend of two vintages—the union of a small part of the hot, powerful 2022 with the crisper, more elegant and aromatic 2023. A salute to Groppello 2024! The new concrete vat in which it is maturing is working well, and the wine seem truly promising. We are thinking of bottling it before the 2025 harvest. We’ll keep you up-to-date.

TASTING THE WINES

In April, with the opening of the season, we’re starting the tastings at the winery again. We remind you that it’s always best to let us know beforehand or set a time with us via e-mail or telephone.

EVENTS

This year, too, we decided to skip Vinitaly (6-9 April). Although we continue to think that it’s an important trade fair, it’s too large and dispersive for an operation such as ours. Since we are just a few kilometres from the fair, if anyone is interested, we will make ourselves available for business meetings. We can be with you right in the cellar, where we can taste all the new vintages. We are also willing to set up an appointment right at Vinitaly, at the Consorzio di tutela Valtènesi in the Palaexpo Regione Lombardia.

We wish all of you an enjoyable spring!

Cristina and Diego  

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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