Elisabetta Foradori has been a darling of the natural wine movement and a champion of Trentino for decades. She has adopted many ancient wine making techniques, but always strives for balanced, clean and long lived expressions of her native varieties.

A champion of Biodynamics, selection massale, experimentation and the natural wine movement, Elisabetta and her children have been making strides in Trentino. Their slice of heaven is known as the Campo Rotaliano, a 400 acre flood plain formed by the the rivers Adige and Noce bordered on its three sides by sheer rock faces. The ultra-draining soil is a an alluvial conglomeration of mineral rich rocks and silt from all over the Alps. It is the spell that unlocks the magic in her favorite grape, Teroldego. Once thought an insipid wine for early drinking, Elisabetta and others have now proven it to be as intense and long lived as the rest of the world's finest red wines.

Professional Reviews

What importer Bowler Wine has to say about this wine...

100% Teroldego. Local dialect for "vine shoot", "Sgarzon" is a cooler, sandier 2.5 hectares of vines on the Campo Rotaliano plateau near the winery in the foothills of the Dolomites. Elisabetta planted the vines in guyot from massale cuttings in 1984. The farming is certified-biodynamic and the harvest is by hand. The bunches are destemmed, with the grapes going directly into clay amphorae (tinajas from J. Padilla in Spain) for an open-top, spontaneous fermentation without sulfur; the vessels are then closed for 6-8 months of maceration. The wine is bottled without fining or filtering and with its only small dose of sulfur. Sgarzon and its identically made companion wine, Morei (from a warmer, stonier vineyard area nearby) develop more quickly in clay than the foudre-aged Foradori and Granato and are thus released earlier.