Making wine sounds simple. But every year, the vine surprises you with something you hadn’t imagined back in January. From our granddad Giovanni, we’ve learned to appreciate what unfolds. Perfection is reassuring, but it’s often a bit boring. Character never is. And if we have to choose, we choose character every time.

Cavalleri is our surname, but it’s not what matters most. What matters most is that we’re a community. Some of us work in the vineyard, others in the winery. Some of us have been doing the same things for years, others are new to the job. Each one with the same idea of wine. When we get it right, it’s thanks to the many hands – and hearts – that went into the bottle. It’s all about trust.

The land is not for show. It’s substance. And no two years are ever the same. Sometimes it rains when it shouldn’t. Sometimes the heat comes too soon. Sometimes it requires patience. If you ignore this, your wines will be predictable, but they won’t have anything to say. But if you listen to the soil, each vintage will have a voice. And when it hits the right note, you’ll have a wine to remember.

On our travels, we take a look at different vines and talk to other winemakers. We do this to learn, not to collect ideas. Then we come back here and ask ourselves: would that make sense for this soil, this climate, this hill? If the answer is yes, we give it a go. Tradition doesn’t mean standing still. It means moving in the right direction.

Here in Erbusco, we grow our grapes on 40 hectares of land, divided into 25 plots. We could make far more bottles than we do, but we produce just 180,000 at the most, because we aim to listen and to understand each individual section of the land. We harvest them and vinify the grapes separately. Not to make life difficult, but to grasp its very essence. At the end of
the day, this is our craft. We aspire to bring people a piece of our land, in a glass.