What is Alto Adige and Why Should I Care?
It’s only producing some of Italy’s best white wines. No big deal.
If you want to find the best white wines in Italy, just keep driving north. Not just to Milan or Venice, but as far north as you can go, past Lake Garda and up (and up, and up) into the craggy limestone precipices of the Dolomites. When the roadside signage shifts from Italian to German and you get the sense that any wrong turn might land you in Austria, you’ve found Alto Adige (or South Tyrol, or Südtirol). It’s here, about as far from Italy as you can get while still being in Italy, that some of the country’s most highly-regarded white wines are born.
What is Alto Adige? Long a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before coming to rest within Italy’s borders at the end of World War I, Alto Adige tends to embrace its Austro-German heritage over its Italian citizenship. Almost every proper place name (including the names of its vineyards) has both an Italian and a German variation. You’re more likely to hear German than Italian spoken on the streets of Bolzano (or Bözen), the region’s primary burg. You can easily find fantastic local beer, served next to schnitzel, in distinctly biergarten-esque environs. You’re not necessarily in Salzburg, but Naples this is not.
Viticulturally, the region also has a foot in two worlds, or perhaps three or four. The DOC allows for 20 different grape varieties, ranging from those indigenous to the region (Lagrein and Schiava, both used in red wine production) to white grape varieties most would think of as “Italian” (Pinot Grigio, Pinot Bianco) to those more commonly associated with Germany/Austria and/or France (Gewürztraminer, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Müller-Thurgau, Riesling, Sylvaner, and Kerner, a delightful cross between Riesling and the native Schiava). While the region historically leaned heavily on its indigenous red grapes (particularly Schiava, also known as Vernatsch) to define itself, over the past few decades it has transitioned from a red-dominant region to one where white wines account for 62% of total production, led by Pinot Grigio.
The vital stats, for those who thrive on such things: Alto Adige has just 5,300 hectares — so roughly 13,000 acres — under vine, making it one of the smallest wine producing regions in Italy (for comparison, Tuscany has something like 60,000 hectares under vine). The elevation in Alto Adige ranges from 200 to 1,000 meters, and the same glacial and geologic forces that produced the jagged spines of the Dolomites left a wide variety of soils scattered across this relatively small area. The Dolomites (and larger Alps) themselves shelter the region from colder air to the north, allowing warm Mediterranean air from the south to bathe the region’s steep hillsides during long summer days. Travel the area, and you’ll hear a lot about microclimates. From valley to valley, the weather can vary on any given day.
Couple that climactic variety with the wide variation in soil types across the region, and it’s not so difficult to see how Alto Adige can reliably produce wine from 20 different grape varieties, and do so at a very high quality. Though a relatively tiny region, more than 98% of its wines are DOC wines, meaning they meet the regulatory quality standards required to wear “Alto Adige DOC” (or the name of one of the region’s sub-appellations) on their labels. In other words, virtually no one in the region devotes their grapevines to low-quality bulk wine production. Alto Adige is alone among Italian wine regions in that distinction, and it’s a testament to a certain reverence for quality and precision that pervades the region.
Why should I care? Because Alto Adige is widely considered to be among the best regions for white wines in all of Italy. That places it squarely among the best regions for white wines on the planet.
Moreover, it produces the kinds of wines that make you reconsider your biases. Alto Adige wines will not only introduce you to grapes you’ve potentially never heard of, but will take common varieties you thought you understood — Pinot Grigio being perhaps the best example — and completely recalibrate your thinking.
So much Pinot Grigio is made to a certain spec, and that spec is often “inexpensive and inoffensive,” something restaurants and wines shops can move in large volumes at a decent markup. It’s perfectly palatable, but unremarkable. But not here. Take that same grape up the mountainside to the capable winemakers of Alto Adige (who take their Pinot Grigio very, very seriously), and the difference is night and day. Unlike the thin, one-dimensional wines churned out en masse at flatter, lower elevations, Pinot Grigio wines from Alto Adige are layered, round, even creamy in texture. There’s body and complexity and an attention to detail that place them among the most respected expressions of Pinot Grigio anywhere, full stop.
And that’s just the Pinot Grigio. We haven’t yet touched on the fact that Alto Adige is also widely considered to make some of the world’s best Pinot Bianco. A lot of the region’s best wines are blends, but the single variety wines made from those grapes more commonly associated with Austria and Germany — particularly those from the Valle Isarco DOC (look for it on the bottle) — give their counterparts from those countries a serious run for their money. You’d be hard pressed to find another wine region of this size producing this many grape varieties at this level of precision.
As such, Alto Adige provides us with a whole lot of wine to explore (and that’s not even accounting for the region’s many fantastic reds). We’ll no doubt push further into Alto Adige and examine some specific wines in-depth in later posts. But for now, here’s three very affordable bottles worth tracking down:
Elena Walch ‘Vigna Castel Ringberg’ Pinot Grigio 2019 If you’re the type to pass on Pinot Grigio, let this wine turn your head. Typical PG notes of citrus and apple are present, but also peach, pear, some green tropical fruit, and a solid minerality topped off with the slightest bit of soft oak and a touch of textured creaminess. This is a full, multi-faceted, and harmonious wine. ($30)
Cantina Colterenzio ‘PRAIL’ Sauvignon 2019 Lees-aged in a mix of stainless steel and Slavonian oak, this wine is full of freshly cut yellow apple, lemon, melon, and white flowers with a stony, flinty finish. A fantastic Sauv Blanc at this price. ($17)
Abbazia di Novacella Kerner 2019 From way up in the Valle Isacro, this wine brings the faint sweetness of a drier Riesling alongside a zingy acidity and a melange of apple, kiwi, peach, mango, and honeysuckle. Another steal at around $20, it’s got plenty of oomph to pair well with fish or less-hearty pasta dishes, but there’s no need to wait for dinnertime. This is anytime wine. ($22) —CD
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Just Following Up
• Our last edition of Ab Ovo took a detour into the overly-complicated world of beverage alcohol regulation and direct-to-consumer shipping prohibitions for spirits producers. If that piqued your interest, The Drinks Business this week goes long on the ways the Biden administration may shake up drinks distribution in the U.S., while sister trade publication The Spirits Business catches up with a few of the U.S. trade groups pushing to ease DTC restrictions hurting craft distillers. Meanwhile, the inestimable Wayne Curtis relates The Saga of the U.S. Post Office & Booze over at The Daily Beast.
• AO alum Tim McKirdy and Vinepair have launched Cocktail College, a podcast taking a weekly deep dive into classic cocktails alongside America’s best bartenders. A great cocktail is more than a list of ingredients, and if you’ve ever wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the techniques and philosophy that lead to the perfect Old Fashioned or Martini, this podcast is for you. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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