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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! For example, this year started out with a spring that was wet, but the rains were not really heavy, followed by a near-endless bout of heat that often reached way-above-average torrid temperatures, which our few summer showers mitigated only now and then. These conditions forced us to perform even more green-harvesting than usual, to ensure optimal ripening to the few remaining clusters. All of this, plus the dry heat, gave us a fairly early harvest, and with a low crop. The grapes, however, were sound and healthy, with deep pigment and fine sugar levels, and right now they are making wines that are particularly rich and powerful. At Cantrina, we can say without any doubt that this will be an excellent vintage, especially for the late-ripening reds, while it will be a good vintage for the whites and Pinot Noir, but they suffered in the heat while they were ripening, and their aromatics will be somewhat weaker than the norm. Work in the cellar Re-structuring work in the cellar deserves a whole chapter all to itself, work that kept us busy throughout the summer and which unfortunately is not yet completely finished. In order to improve the quality of our winemaking and to make the cellar more efficient and to support the slow but constant growth of our modest output, we decided to upgrade our production area. We retired most of the fermentation vats and storage tanks, replaced the old press with a larger, more efficient model, and–quite important–overhauled our tank temperature system, installing a more powerful, programmable unit. You wouldn’t believe how the cellar appeared when the grapes started to arrive: it was wide open every day, constantly a-buzz with plumbers, electricians, equipment installers, and stuff all over the place, and us always there having to coordinate everything and solve all the problems that seemed to arise with each new day…  

Harvest 2019

posted on 18 November 2019
cantrinavendemmia2019
Autumn has FINALLY arrived. The long and hot Summer 2019, which lasted till October, is now behind us.  Now, the weather is inviting us to stay a bit in the house (or in the cellar) and is helping us to think straight…. That past season was, here in our area, one of the strangest and most complicated within recent memory. We found ourselves having to face conditions that were simultaneously both extreme and contradictory. The cold and rains during flowering caused a reduction in the potential crop, and two hailstorms in June and early August caused even worse damage, since they actually halved the crop.

Cantrina, a 20-year-old taste

posted on 13 June 2019
Cantrina Ventennale
This coming March, the new 2018 vintage of Riné, its second vintage as a certified organic wine, will debut on the market under a screw cap for the first time, and so we want to talk a bit about this type of closure. We have been using this closure for some years now for Rosanoire, and since last year for our latest-born Valtènesi Chiaretto. We have found the results positive in terms of cellarability, soundness, and crispness, in particular over the medium- and long-term; our customers, often tired of opening wines that were tainted, have expressed full satisfaction.

20th Cantrina's anniversary

posted on 19 February 2019
cantrinaventianni
Here we are again with our newsletter to start out the year, and as you’ve already noticed, it arrived a bit later than usual, since we decided to let Befana fly unannounced this year… But 2019 will be, in fact, a memorable one for us.
For it was in “long-ago” 1999, amidst countless apprehensions, much enthusiasm, and just a pinch of bravado, that we decided to launch “Project Cantrina”. It represented above all the long-time dream of founder Dario Dattoli, who since the early 1990s dedicated himself to producing just handful of bottles—but made with meticulous care!—for his own enjoyment in his numerous restaurants.
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