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TrentoDOC

It is becoming the face of Trentino wine. While people of a certain age, like myself, will always identify Teroldego with Trentino, and to a less extent Pinot Grigio, with TrentoDOC Trentino has truly established a unique and distinct identity.

Sparkling wine from Italy?  Well of course, it’s Prosecco, right?

Yes, while that is a correct answer,, the the Prosecco phenomenon has been a huge commercial success opening eyes to the potential for sparkling wine in Italy, it’s just a short hop to the west where something even more interesting is going on. TrentoDoc is emerging as Italy’s premier sparking wine region. Not with soft, off dry, fruity and immediately appealing wine, but with an assortment of Metodo Classico wines that can compete with the world’s best bottle fermented sparklers.  

The history of Metodo Classico wines in Trentino is fairly long and strong, with the region’s benchmark, Ferrari, having been founded in 1902 with brands such as Equip  5 offering more affordable offerings through the 1960s and 1970s. These brands helped to guide the region’s farmers towards more intelligent plantings of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. For most of the history of sparkling wine in Trentino that was the picture: producers and farmers, working together but not always towards the same ends.  The revolution of replacing quantity with quality that as transformed the Italian wine scene since the 1970s is perhaps nowhere more apparent than here. The early pioneers laid a strong foundation on which today’s producers can build.

In fact, over the past decade the wines of TrentoDOC have transformed themselves from wines that were built more on process, with the heavily toasty autolytic character that is so typical with Metodo Classico wines throughout the world to wines that are great wines before they are great bubbles.

Confusing? Perhaps a bit but let’s consider for a moment how Sparkling wines are generally made. They are produced either in a region where grapes barely ripen, or in a region where fruit is picked well before maturity to preserve acidity and limit alcohol. That is what a Metodo Classico base wine requires: freshness. But what if one found a region where even at maturity grapes produced wines with high acidity and low alcohol. What if nights cooled by mountain breezes and days limited by the sheltering shadows of high mountains created an environment where the base wines for a Metodo Classico were actually fruity, complex, and attractive Wouldn’t it make sense then to try and highlight this character?

This of course is the linchpin of TrentoDOC’s success. Here in Trentino the environment has always been conducive for the production of low alcohol, bright and juicy wines. While the more classic Metodo Classico wines benefited from these characteristic, they didn’t highlight them. Today’s producers on the other hand have chosen yeast strains that produce wines with more subtle autolytic character, which is important because the ageing requirements for TrentoDOC  are significant. Instead of changing the aromatic character of the wines, these selected yeast strains seem instead to be utilized primarily to produce a fine mouse and lend a touch of richness and caressing quality to these wines. Of course there are subtle yeasty and toasty flavors, but, with few exceptions,  nothing that would obscure the pure expression of terroir that the base wines provide.

So what exactly is TrentoDOC?

Sparkling wines from the mountains is a simple way to remember what they are but the regulations for production are simple as well.

They are Metodo Classico wines, so secondary fermentation in the bottle, produced from the classic portfolio of grapes predominantly Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, though Pinot Blanc and Pinot Meunier are both authorized varieties. The fruit must come from with the Trento DOC delimited region, and finally there is an extensive and strict ageing on the lees that is the foundation of the quality here. I should add that many producer’s far exceed the minimum times on the lees for their respective wines.

There has been a huge investment in these wines, not only in the vineyard s and the cellars but also in the reserve stock. Touring the region you can only be impressed by the reserves of even the smallest producers. Years of production are waiting for their moment in the sun. It’s a huge sacrifice for the producers; after all there would certainly be demand for these wines if they were bottles as table wine.

A more complete paraphrasing of the DOC regulations can be found here: TrentoDOC regulations. 

​
Terroir

The real beauty of TrentoDOC lies in the exceptional diversity of its terroir. There is no other sparkling wine producing region that draws base wine from such a variety of meso climates, altitudes and soil types.

Why should that matter one might ask?

Simply because a rounder, more opulent base wine might be more suitable for creating an easier to drink base wine white another base wine, more mineral driven, coming from leaner soils in a cooler spot might make for a more complex, nuanced Brut Nature. Or visa versa should that be your want. The point is very simply that the raw materials used to produce TrentoDOC are not unripened fruit, but rather are ripe fruits used to produce a diverse set of base wines. The end result, the character of the wine in the bottle is not simple determined by the production methods but rather are expressions of their origins. Sparking wine is too often a wine of process, a wine born in the cellar but TrentoDOC is a true wine of terroir.  There are other sparkling wines that can say that, but there is no other sparking wine region that is built on this philosophy, this fact.

What makes Trentino so diverse? One need only take a look at a map to see why this region is so special. Built much like a tree with the Adige valley as it’s trunk and several additional valleys branching off into mostly east/west oriented extensions; thus the main wine producing regions can all be associated with specific valleys.

Vallagarina
Alto Garda/ Valle del Sarca
Valle dei Laghi
Valsugana
​Valle di Cembra
Valle dell’Adige
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Trellising: The Pergola and Guyot

Trellising plays a role in the production of wines in Trentino, perhaps a more important role than in most modern viticultural regions. The pergola, both the classic Pergola Trentina that is most often found on the valley hillsides, as well as the double Pergola Trentina found so frequently on the valley floor continue to be very widely used. Guyot has captured the imagination of many producers, but it is often used at higher altitudes where the advantages of the pergola lose pertinence as the climate becomes cooler.

The pergola is particularly well suited to the region for several reasons. An abundance of subsurface water allows for more vegetative growth, the climate is warm so raising fruit further from the humid valley floor is an advantage, and the Ora winds that hustle their way north each afternoon are an ideal partner for the more open pergola, allowing for a superior movement of air that carries away humidity, leaving conditions very favorable for healthy fruit maturation.  The shade provided by the dense canopy of the pergola is certainly another advantage when one is in the business of producing beautiful base wines for sparkling wines, limiting heat and sun effects on the grapes later in the growing season.

At higher elevations and particularly with Pinot Noir, though with Chardonnay as well, as the soils become poorer, and drier, proximately the ground does become an advantage and it is in this situation that one finds a rather wholesale shift to Guyot in effect. In any event, it is a factor in the production of wines here, altering both yields and levels of maturity in  a way that gives producers a certain flexibility not easily attained elsewhere.



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Producers

One final point to keep in mind when discussing TrentoDOC producers is that there are all manner of producers in the region. The biggest players, just a handful of them account for almost 90% of the region’s production Let that sink in for a moment, almost 8 million of the 9 million bottles produced are bottled by big brands.  The remaining production is split between medium and small producers, with most producers aiming for an annual production of about 80,000 bottles per year, though very few are at that level today.

The producers are split between those who own their own vineyards, typically cellars that have longer historical roots in viticulture in the region, albeit with table wines, and those who buy wine or grapes, a long standing tradition in Trentino. When the average consumer thinks of Trentino, well to the average consumer nothing comes to mind but even those in the business associate Trentino with two or three big producers. Easy to vilify in many ways, but when one considers the historical structure of the region, that becomes much harder.

This is a land of farmers, subsistence farmers until recently, people who at first made wine for their own consumption, a reliable and storable source of calories. Once consumption of wine started to fall, and less expensive, well made wines, even in bulk, become commonplace many farmers began selling their grape crop to earn a little money. The only buyers at the time were cooperatives and large producers, a necessity since to produce wine with a hectare, or even two was not an economically feasible proposition and in any event was well out of the financial scope of virtually all farmers at the time. As such the coops and large producers who have long been the purchases of these small harvests not only sustained generations of farmers but also helped to preserve these small pieces of vineyards under private ownership. While no one got rich from farming grapes over the past decade, the richness of the patrimony of the land was preserved and for that we owe those big producer a debt of gratitude.

Having said that what we have preserved is a patchwork of vineyards, small enough to manage individual and tightly tied to each family. It has thus become challenging to buy plots and assemble a critical mass of land leaving many producers as purchasers of fruit from a bevy of small farmers. Many producers have long-term agreements with growers if only over a handshake, while almost all recognize that the only viable long-term strategy is to own at least part of one’s production needs so the industry is ever so slowly moving in that direction.

I see only a slight advantage to owning one's own vineyards if one remains deeply involved in the practices and protocols used throughout the growing season; and the quality of wines seems to vary little between those who farm and those who buy fruit. It is a bit of a trend today to want to support grower producers but one has to know that there is a line between the largest producers who may buy rather indiscriminately, and be able to successfully blend away the least attractive of their fruit, with those who are not fortunate enough to own vineyards but are willing to take the time and make the expenditures required to ensure that their fruit is grown to the highest standards. Oftentimes this fruit is vinified and bottled separately because it is unique and distinct wine made from fruit that was purchased with a specific wine in mind. The flexibility of the negociant in this case cannot be discounted. Buying a high altitude wine for one base wine and a valley floor wine for another base wine is obviously an advantage when creating a portfolio of wines that purport to have substantial differences between them.

All of these factors, finely tweaked since the inception of the TrentoDOC doc in 1992 have been yielding exceptional results for years, though it is only more recently that the region as a whole has found it’s way. It’s an exciting time to be discovering the wines of TrentoDOC, ready to compete with the finest sparkling wines in the world, and still eminently affordable, if not easy to find. That is the next chapter to be written in the story of TrentoDOC: their discovery!  ​
TrentoDOC Blind Tasting: 9/2017
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