The roots of a family are like the roots of a vine reaching down into the marble. It is on these foundations that Noventa bases its distinctive characteristics.
Deep-rooted values
The Noventa family’s passion has very ancient roots: towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, Pierangelo’s great-grandparents grew grapes on the steep Botticino slopes, living in little houses in the hills, a long way from the village.
A lifestyle based on hard toil, a heroic grape-growing enterprise that all too often suffered from the curse of hail, but which left an indelible mark on the Noventa family tree. Over the generations, they handed down values of respect for the land and people, and a willingness to work hard, but also the joy of creating a unique product, love for nature and her generosity, patience to wait for the fruits of our labours to age in casks. These aspects give us moments of happiness and a passion for the world of Italian wine, so vast yet comprising so many elegant products, each reflecting its own distinct land of origin.
The rebirth of Botticino
Back in 1970, the wine made was certainly not the wine we know today: high yield per vine, and low alcohol content because wine was viewed as just another drink. These were hard years for Botticino wine, since the difficulty of working on the sloping terraces, the high production costs and the frequent hail storms persuaded many farmers to abandon the hillside vineyards and find work elsewhere, particularly in the Botticino marble quarries.
It was in those years that Pierangelo, the winery’s current owner, decided to go against the current trend and dedicate his life to wine-making. He aimed to recover many abandoned vineyards, a reminder of past years when BOTTICINO wine ruled supreme on the tables of all the inns and “trani” of Brescia and its province. He therefore attended the first wine-making course to be held in Brescia and, a few years later, the first A.I.S. sommelier course, thus improving and perfecting the production methods he already knew, making work in the cellar increasingly methodical and precise, all under the supervision of his oenologist and friend Cesare Ferrari.
But the cellar was not the place where Pierangelo wanted to start creating his wine of excellence: the vineyard has always been his great passion, and the open secret behind his desire to make a wine that would express the unique nature of its land.
Today
Since then it has been an uphill battle, but it has given Pierangelo and his family great joys and emotional satisfactions: today at Botticino, the Noventa family cultivates 11 hectares of vineyards high in the hills, and Pierangelo was joined in the business some years ago by his daughters Alessandra and Rossella and by Cristian, Alessandra’s husband.
They have been registered with the Lombardy Region as organic producers since 2011. All this is very much against the trend of large-scale production, the world market and globalisation, but we are proud to cultivate and promote an important part of the farming and wine-making history of Brescia and indeed of Italy itself.