Cinque Terre wines: mirror of a landscape

Cinque Terre wines keep distinguishing themselves at national level. Only in the last few weeks, our winemakers have collected several recognitions. Experts reward these wines not only for their organoleptic properties, but also because of their capacity to express a unique link with their landscape of origin.

For example, Cinque Terre Ma Va' 2016 - a vernacular-named wine from the area of Vernazza - has received the Corona, the highest recognition awarded by the "Vinibuoni d'Italia 2018” guide issued by the Italian Touring Club. The DOC white wine produced by Azienda Agricola CHEO led by Bartolomeo Lercari and Lise Betram, together in life and in the vineyard, distinguished itself at the last edition of the Merano Wine Festival for “its quality, drinkability, pleasantness, and for the correspondence of wine, vine and territory”.

L'U Neigru 2015, a red wine produced at Heidy Bonanini’s Azienda Agricola Possa di Riomaggiore, entered the prestigious top hundred at Milan’s "Golosaria", which lists the 100 best Italian wines. In the Golosaria 2018 Guide, illustrating the Bel Paese's delicious products, journalist Paolo Massobrio wrote: “Heidy wines leave a mark, they are the quintessence of the land that produces them, they need time to express themselves at their best, but convey the true character of the tradition”.

Just a few terraces away, in Manarola, the Romano Levi Prize for Winemaker of the Year, awarded by FAVI (Italian Federation of Independent Winemakers), went to Azienda Agricola Forlini Cappellini. This is the first time that the award goes to a couple: Germana Forlini, born in 1936, and Alberto Cappellini, born in 1932, before becoming associates in 1986, have been married since 1966.

The award received by Forlini Cappellini is important, because it is assigned to independent winemakers, the category which best represents our producers.

Sure enough, winemakers at Cinque Terre do everything by themselves: cultivation and harvest, vinification and bottling, and even traditional handiwork such as dry stone walls. 

Production consists of just few bottles in which the winemaker puts all his or her efforts. Overall, 205,300 litres of wine and 9,200 litres of Sciacchetrà are produced at Cinque Terre. Low yield, high quality, little marketing and much authenticity in Cinque Terre’s wines which, despite the harshness of their landscape, are able to convey light and joy.

Alessandro Crovara, another winemaker from Manarola, expressed this concept in an interview aired some days ago during the broadcast “Geo & Geo”: “We aren’t heroes, we are the keepers of the great heritage that our ancestors left us. We keep up our identity and we are happy in our vineyards.”

“We pay homage to and thank our winemakers” says acting president Vincenzo Resasco “not heroes but real people who, in spite of the difficulties of extreme viticulture, are glad to keep giving beauty to our land, and to let us taste it in ever more valuable wines”.

The words that Fabrizio Scarpato wrote in 2013, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of DOC Cinque Terre, sound more relevant than ever: “Defining farmers as heroes means confining them in a ghetto - abandoning them, turning them into relics, emptying them and making folklore items of them, good to be digitally photographed and immediately converted to sepia tone (…) Happy is the country which needs no heroes, and neither does Cinque Terre. We may need dreaming, enterprising, possibly crazy people, but no heroes”.