The arc of the Italian wine industry bends towards quality in the 21st century, something that has become increasingly clear to Sue and me as we have visited many of Italy’s important wine regions in recent years.

Quality has not always been Italian wine’s guiding star, however. Piero Antinori’s 2014 book The Hills of Chianti traces the 20th-century transformation of Italian wine from quantity to quality that continues today. The role of forward-thinking family wineries and their intense focus on quality from the vineyard to the cellar and beyond comes through on every page.

We recently sampled wines from two of our favorite regions — Romagna and Piemonte — that illustrate Antinori’s hypothesis about the link between quality and family-owned wineries.

>>><<<

Rediscovering Romagna

I was reminded of Antinori’s book recently when we were invited to taste wines from Romagna, a region that extends from the Adriatic coast inward toward Bologna. We enjoyed these wines, mainly Sangiovese di Romagna and Albana di Romagna, when we lived in Bologna years ago (I was a visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins center there).

The wines were perfect with the city’s rich cuisine. We look for them here in America, but they are hard to find. I once asked one of the Colli Bolognesi winemakers about the problem and he just pointed over the hill. Tuscany, he said. Tuscany (and Antinori, I guess) get all the attention. We mostly sell our wines at home.

But the bending arc can have many effects and it seems to me that the rising quality of Italian wine offers wine drinkers around the world new opportunities, both within Tuscany (as Antinori’s book suggests) and in other parts of Italy, too.

All in the Family

So we were excited to taste the Romagna wines of Poggio della Dogana and Ronchi di Castelluccio, wineries owned by the brothers Aldo and Paolo Rametta. The Rametta family does not have centuries of history in the wine business like the Antinori family, but they are firmly rooted in the Romagna region. After working in other industries (finance and renewable energy), Aldo and Paolo Rametta found it impossible to resist scratching the itch to return home to work with the land. Wine, of course, but not just wine. They are interested in agriculture and bring family business values to their work.

Poggio della Dogana was their first investment in 2016; then an unexpected opportunity appeared in 2020 to purchase Ronchi di Castelluccio, the very well-known maker of Sangiovese di Romagna. We know the latter winery because their Le More Sangiovese di Romagna is a wine we can sometimes find here at home to pair with Sue’s authentic Bolognese ragu.

Everybody and Nobody

We couldn’t resist sampling the Ronchi di Castelluccio Buco del Prete Romagna DOC Sangiovese Modigliana, made with grapes from a vineyard carved into a forest clearing in 1989. We paired the wine with roast chicken (which we often have with Pinot Noir) and I think the combination made us appreciate the elegance of the medium-bodied wine and the complexity that lingered on the finish. An excellent wine. We can’t wait to try the Ronco della Simia, made with grapes from an even older vineyard.

We loved the Sangiovese, but I admit that the Poggio della Dogana Belladamaa Romagna DOCG Albana Secco stole our hearts. Why? Quality was part of the answer, of course. Albana is a white wine that thinks it is red, with good body and memorable herby notes on the finish in the case of the Belladama.

We often enjoyed Albana wines when we lived in Bologna, but we always thought of it as a simple, easy wine, not something that can be serious. So tasting a next-level Albana got our attention.

But, if I am honest, it is also something that Aldo Rametta said on a Zoom call. Everyone drinks Albana in Romagna, he said, but no one drinks it anywhere else. And it is true. But maybe a wine like this at a time like this can change things. In fact, quality white wines from up and down Italy are now finally getting attention and developing followings in export markets.

>>><<<

Tenuta Carretta was founded in 1467 when sharecropping arrangements were formalized for the estate north of the city of Alba. As Antinori’s book explains, sharecropping remained the dominant organization for Italian agriculture into the mid-20th century and in wine the turn towards quality only gained strength when the difficult transition from sharecropping was complete. In all its long history the Carretta estate has changed hands only a few times. The winery’s website explains that

In 1811, after 350 years, the property passed from the Marquis Damiano to the Count of Roero, who cultivated it for 120 years. In 1932, he gave the estate to the Veglia family of Turin. In 1985, the property finally passed to the Miroglio family from Alba, founders and owners of the textile group with the same name.

The Miroglio family’s commitment to the winery strikes me as very much fitting into Antinori’s ethos and the Rametta brothers’ work in Romagna. The Miroglio family have roots in the Langhe. Their apparel empire began there before expanding around the world. Their purchase of Tenuta Carretta almost 40 years ago seems to have been about family and tradition and they have invested considerable time and effort to develop distinctive wines that reflect the particular terroirs of Roero and the Alta Langa. Each wine is meant to be unique to its time and place, to bend the arc even more toward the quality pole.

Tenuta Carretta makes the great red wine varieties of  Piedmont, so it is noteworthy that the samples they sent us were white wines: the Roero Arneis DOCG Riserva “Alteno della Fontana” and the Langhe DOC Riesling “Campofranco.”  Interest is rising in white wines these days and many consumers are searching for distinctive wines, so we welcomed the opportunity to taste these wines.

The Roero Arneis DOCG Riserva was a wonderful wine, refined and elegant. It is a proper reserve wine having spent 24 months aging on lees and a further year resting in bottle. The Riesling was a completely different experience, however.

You might be surprised to see a Riesling from Piemonte, but we know a few other Piemonte winemakers who produce Riesling because they just love this noble grape variety and cannot resist the temptation to see what it will produce here. It seems that a great deal of effort was necessary to make this Riesling a reality. A special terroir was discovered in a long-abandoned vineyard area (“franco” in the name “Campofranco” means “unused”). It is kind of extreme terroir and the cellar treatment is distinctive, too. The result is a wine that Sue said she wouldn’t have guessed to be a Riesling. Lots of minerality, a whiff of petrol that quickly disappeared. Fascinating and delicious. Kinda wild, too. Worth seeking out as are all the Tenuta Carretta wines we have tried.

>>><<<

At the end of Piero Antinori’s book, he peers into the future and sees the outlines of what is recognizably the wine world of today, where consumption quantities are falling, wine quality is rising, the family wine firms are stronger than ever. He was right about quality and about the challenges he saw ahead for the wine market generally. Time will tell how family wineries fare in the global and local market adjustments that lie ahead. These seem like just the sort of challenges that family wineries are built for.