Ancient origins, modern taste and recent past with a few ups and downs in contrast to a promising future thanks to the rediscovery and enhancement of its best characteristics. To toast in the spring there is nothing better than a glass of Romagna Trebbiano CDO, a versatile convivial wine which is perfect as much for a picnic with piadina and cold cuts as a fish dinner with a view of the sea.
Trebbiano is a white grape vine grown on an area of 14,170 hectares and is the most cultivated in Emilia-Romagna and in particular the province of Ravenna. The 2020 vintage yielded a production of 8,678 hectolitres, equivalent to 1.2 million bottles. These are large numbers for one of the most important CDO wines in the region, even if for its official recognition, which arrived on 31 August 1973, Romagna had to struggle for ten long years. The first page of “La Mercuriale Romagnola” says it all. In the October of that year this magazine, founded by Alteo Dolcini, opened with an article with Fellinian title “Amarcord”, summarising the “incredulity, scepticism, dissent, angry impatience” that emerged from the “first proposal to obtain this very high blazon” until it was actually obtained.
The presence of Trebbiano Romagnolo in the region was documented since the 14th century by Pier de’ Crescenzi of Bologna (“There is another kind of grape, known as Tribiana, which is white with abundant small round grapes, which does not grow fruit when young but becomes fertile with age”) and in the Middle Ages it was counted among the “luxury wines”. With the passing of the centuries however, a different image of Trebbiano emerged in which it was often considered a wine with a simple character. Its productivity and ability to adapt to the most diverse types of soil and climatic conditions helped it to spread and its use for the production of a considerable number of still and semi-sparkling white CDO wines in both sweet and dry versions.
Getting back to Romagna Trebbiano CDO and the present day, on the palate we find a wine with excellent freshness with immediately pleasant taste but also able to surprise the most selective palates with its evolution in time. To appreciate both these aspects, which are not always both present together, just put on the table two bottles which we can find along the “Strada della Romagna”: the Floresco di Podere La Berta and Corallo Argento of the Gallegati winery, both Romagna Trebbiano CDO produced entirely in hill country vineyards.
The first, produced from grapes grown at an altitude of two hundred metres, is convincingly sapid, comforting and blessed with fragrant tones that make it an intriguing contemporary wine. “The sorb tree shown in the label – explained the winery – is very rustic, has a long life, even reaching 400 years, and requires a lot of light. Trebbiano was the first vine planted in our vineyard and we want to celebrate it with a plant that can best preserve its history”.
Golden colours and notes recalling iodine and the sea are instead the predominant characteristics of the Gallegati version which comes from a fifty-year-old vineyard and has the ability to evolve in time without losing vibrancy and tenseness on the palate typical of the great international white wines. The comeback dates from the tasting of the 1999 vintage when the Trebbiano was stilled called “Carlino”: a surprisingly balanced dynamic wine with long aftertaste and a vertical finish.
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