The history of our family has its roots in the past. The winery, specialized in the production of Classic Method Pinot Noir, is located in Torre degli Alberi, a small village on the hills of the Oltrepò Pavese, 500 meters above sea level, where I was born and lived until I was 10 years old.
The property is gathered around a fourteenth-century tower, traditionally managed as sharecroppers and cultivated with cereals, fodder and vines. After the Second World War, my grandfather also decided to start raising chickens, adopting cutting-edge American techniques and thus laying the foundations for modern Italian poultry farming. In the seventies my father began the semi-wild breeding of Limousine cows under an organic regime.
Wine and the vineyard have always been present in the history of our company, even though all the vineyards were uprooted about forty years ago. The altitude (500 m above sea level) and the weather conditions, in fact, made the microclimate too cold to produce quality wine: until then a red wine had been produced intended for self-consumption by local farmers.
On the contrary, in recent years our lands have found themselves to have ideal conditions for the production of sparkling wines, due to global warming which forces us to push production ever higher, in search of areas with a cooler microclimate, an indispensable condition to produce quality sparkling wines.
So, in 2009 my father Camillo decided to relaunch the company's winemaking activity and planted the highest Pinot Noir vineyard in the entire Oltrepò Pavese. For two years I have been taking care of the vineyard with him, after the choice to leave Milan - where I was a vet - to return to Oltrepò, with my wife and our little girls.
Our vineyard benefits from exposure to the sun's rays until sunset and an excellent temperature range, especially in summer. Between the rows the soil is grassed and fertilized with the manure produced on the farm, without herbicides; the vines protected only with authorized organic farming products (copper and sulphur). We harvest by hand in the coolest hours of the day, with the utmost care, in small ventilated boxes, in order to bring the bunches to the cellar while they are still perfectly intact.
With scrupulous and careful work in the vineyard throughout the year we obtain healthy and good grapes which allows us to intervene as little as possible with technology and chemistry in the cellar and not to alter the natural essence of the wine.
Giacomo, with Camillo Dal Verme
