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Riné

posted on 21 March 2022
Dear Customers and Winelovers, We’d like to talk to you a bit about our Riné. Although it has changed over the years, we conceived Cantrina’s white wine--our distinctive blend of Riesling and Chardonnay, and a bit of other white varieties we grow here in our estate vineyards--as one that would evolve and mature with cellaring, offering its best even many years after bottling. We noticed, though, in the few years, that we were often forced to sell Riné too soon, and thus offering our customers a wine that was still inexpressive and therefore not fully appreciated for what it really was. Thus our decision to fully recognise the unique merits of this unusual wine by postponing the release of Riné 2020 at least until autumn 2022. As you well know, ours is a very limited production, fruit of a meticulous quality-selection of grapes grown in 8 hectares of organically-cultivated vineyards. Further, we have now had three successive growing years of below-average crops, a challenge that has constrained us to reduce the number of bottles or made it difficult to even produce some of our wines at all. We define ourselves as artisanal winegrowers, which means striving to pay close attention to every single detail in order to follow the most natural path possible in achieving our particular idea of the wine that we bottle and offer to our wine-loving customers. One “detail” that is fundamental for us, throughout the winemaking process, is the selection of the right time. There is a right time for harvesting, a right time for fermenting, for racking, for maturing the wine, for bottling, and, finally, for the right time-length for its ageing in the bottle before the right time arrive to fully enjoy the fruit of such lengthy efforts. Believe us, this decision has cost us a great effort, both logistical and, of course, financial, and it pains us to have to leave some customers wine-less for some months, but we are convinced that our choice will come to be appreciated over time as an act of rigorous winemaking and of respect for all the fans of this superb wine. Thank you, Cristina and Diego

Groppello 2015

posted on 22 October 2015
In exercising my profession, I’ve been “treading the vineyards” for a good thirty years now, more or less, and I never expected to find such utterly fantastic Groppello! Totally unexpected, because Groppello, planted over hardly more than 400 hectares, exclusively on the Brescian side of Lago di Garda, is a challenging grape to grow. Its tight-packed cluster of “knotted-up” (groppello) berries; thin skin, with often little pigment; its hard-to-achieve balance of sugar and acidity—all these mean that even in good growing years the grapes struggle to ripen adequately, and suffer attacks of mould well before the harvest arrives.

Una giornata di imbottigliamento a Cantrina

posted on 15 July 2015
Giornata lunga, caldissima e impegnativa: abbiamo, infatti, messo in bottiglia e confezionato più di 17.000 bottiglie – un record per la nostra piccola azienda – tra vini di nostra produzione e quelli in conto lavorazione per altre aziende. L’imbottigliamento è l’ultima fase del processo di produzione di un vino ed è un momento molto delicato, nel quale nulla deve essere lasciato al caso, poiché si rischierebbe di vanificare mesi (e a volte anni) di attesa e lavoro per una semplice mancanza o disattenzione.

May 2015

posted on 13 May 2015
Here we go again: cut the weeds, sucker, select and thin the buds, train the shoots on the wires… The season hasn’t even started yet and we’re already behind with our work in the vineyards, and from here until harvest we’ll be running back and forth to keep the vineyards in good condition.
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