Valdadige Terradeiforti DOC

A narrow stretch of the Adige valley where Trentino meets the Veronese, given over to two red varieties that grow essentially nowhere else. The name means land of the forts, and it is literal.

The Terroir The registered file places the zone in the prealpine valley of the river Adige, between the Lessinia plateau and the chain of Monte Baldo, and notes that it is renowned for the presence of numerous forts. The sun-facing terraced vineyards, it says, favour the polyphenolic and anthocyanin content of the reds even at medium-high altitudes; in the whites the range of aromas is tied to cool temperatures and considerable diurnal swings. The soils are siliceous-calcareous, which the file credits with giving balanced fruit and mineral notes in the Pinot whites while exalting the forest-fruit and spice of the two native reds, which in this valley find their ideal habitat.

The Forts The valley is a chokepoint — the Adige is the main road from Verona to the Brenner — and it is lined with nineteenth-century Austrian and Italian fortifications built to hold it. They give the denomination its name, and they explain the shape of the vineyard: a defile a few kilometres wide with terraced walls on both flanks.

Grape Varieties Enantio and Casetta, each bottled as a named type and each with a riserva, plus Pinot Grigio for the white. Enantio — long called Lambrusco a Foglia Frastagliata, for its deeply cut leaf — is the more remarkable of the two: it is unusually close to the wild grapevine of the surrounding woods, and its modern name was borrowed from a wine Pliny mentions. Casetta is rarer still, was down to a few rows by the 1980s, and was recovered by a handful of growers in this valley alone.

The Critical Take Two obscure varieties in a valley most people drive through at speed is not a commercial proposition, and Terradeiforti has never pretended otherwise. The wines are worth the detour: Enantio is dark, sharply acidic and tannic with a distinct wild-bramble edge, and it needs age or food; Casetta is softer, more perfumed, and easier to like. Neither tastes like anything else in northern Italy, which is the point. Production is small and almost entirely local.

Close to the Wild Vine Enantio’s interest is genetic as much as gastronomic. Most cultivated European varieties are far removed from Vitis vinifera sylvestris, the wild vine that still grows along the Adige; Enantio is not, and it retains characteristics — the jagged leaf, the small berries, the ferocious acidity — that domestication usually breeds out. It is one of the few commercially bottled wines in Europe made from something so close to the original plant.

At the Table Trentino and Veronese mountain cooking: polenta, smoked meats, game, lucanica, and aged Monte Veronese. Serve the Enantio at 16–17°C and decant it; the Casetta a degree cooler.

Benchmark Producers Albino Armani and the Cantina Valdadige cooperative, which between them account for most of what is bottled.