RuvidaMente
“A valley surrounded by tall and terrible mountains, it makes really powerful wines.” In that brief but fundamentally exhaustive description in his Codice
Atlantico, Leonardo Da Vinci summed up the Valtellina. Carved out of the mountains by the river Adda, the valley is located slightly more than 100 kilometers to the northeast of Milan in the
province of Sondrio. It is a large area, green and lush, that contains many monuments and is dominated by mountains that are truly “tall and terrible.” But they have made the
inhabitants’ fortunes, since they attract innumerable tourists in winter.
Carved out of the slopes that descend to the Adda, the vineyards of the Valtellina produce a series of red wines that are among Lombardy’s most prestigious. And they
fully confirm, at a distance of five centuries, Da Vinci’s lapidary description.
Winemaking has ancient origins in the Valtellina. The vine was cultivated by the Etruscans and the Ligurians, the earliest inhabitants of the region, in the pre-Roman
period. The valley belonged to Rhetia, a vast province that included, in addition to the Valtellina, the canton of the Grisons, the Verona district, the valley of the Adige and part of Austria.
And its wines were mentioned by the greatest Latin authors, including Pliny, Cato the Elder, Martial and Virgil in his Georgics. Viticultural continued to flourish in succeeding centuries. In the
book Raetia, published in 1616, Giovanni Guler Von Weimek, governor of the Valtellina, minutely described the condition of the vineyards and the wines in his epoch.
Since then, the panorama of the vineyards has not substantially changed. Today, as then, the vineyards are for the most part planted on terraces supported by dry-stone
walls. The vine-growing spaces have been wrested from the mountains, a square meter at a time, through the stubborn labor of the area’s growers.
Map of the production area
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