La Distesa

Jonathan Nossiter, director of Mondovino and Resistenza Naturale and author of the excellent book Liquid Memory, once said that it takes poets to make great wines. Corrado Dottori is one of them.

Corrado Dottori is, first and foremost, a winemaker. He would probably be quite content to be defined as such, but doing so would overlook a significant part of his activities. In 2012, he published the book Non è il vino dell’enologo (“It’s not the winemaker’s wine”), described as “the lexicon of a dissenting winemaker,” and in 2017 he released La Musica Vuota, a reflection on the generation now in their 40s and 50s, in which he made music—a second central theme in his life—the protagonist. Not far from his winery, he also runs a small agriturismo with his wife and frequently writes blog posts on his website. But “blogger” doesn’t quite do him justice—he’s better described as an essayist, a forward thinker, and a sharp commentator on contemporary concepts of wine.

Cupramontana

Corrado Dottori’s winery, La Distesa, is located in Cupramontana, in the heart of the Marche region. This is also the land of Verdicchio, the area’s great white grape variety. Most of his seven hectares are planted with Verdicchio, a large part of them in the San Michele vineyard—something of a Grand Cru within Cupramontana, itself considered the qualitative capital of Verdicchio. The vines, mostly between 25 and 45 years old, grow in soil formed 23 million years ago, made up of various marine-origin sedimentary rocks. The topography is rarely flat and often extremely steep. Since the 17th century, the terroir around Cupramontana has been regarded as ideal for producing long-lived, structured, and aromatically complex wines—and in the last 40 years, more and more wines have begun to live up to this historic reputation.

Corrado Dottori began making his first wines in 2000, from just three small vineyard plots. Though he had occasionally helped his parents in the vineyards before that, he was living in Milan after studying economics, and rarely returned to his hometown. Once he made the decision to leave the big city and become a winemaker, his first task was to develop an understanding of the unique character of his vineyards and terroirs.

So he listened to the old growers in the area and embedded their knowledge into an approach that, from the outset, embraced the dialectic between nature and culture.

The Equilibrist

On the La Distesa website, Corrado defines his work as follows:
"The authentic winemaker is an equilibrist. He loves risk. He walks the steep ridge between triumph and failure. Always in balance. Always in suspension. On the rock face, with his eyes on unknown terrain. He climbs as best he can, never knowing what will happen with the next move."

Corrado refuses to mechanize his vineyards or scale up his production. He has added only a few small plots planted with red varieties (Montepulciano, Sangiovese, and Vernaccia Rossa) to his original holdings and has kept it at that. He works almost entirely by hand, developing a close and intense relationship with his vines and the surrounding nature:
“…Between our vine rows, we plant fava beans, lupins, peas, and alfalfa, and we respect the physiology of the vine: …we prune gently, do not defoliate, do not fertilize, and use only sulfur and copper in the smallest possible quantities. We apply nettle and horsetail teas; in autumn and spring, we spray biodynamic preparations. In our vineyards (and olive groves), you’ll find not only vines, but also shrubs, hedges, trees, and constantly changing cover crops.”

His clear goal is to have grapes at harvest that require no unnecessary or manipulative interventions in the cellar—grapes that become wines born of careful, artisanal work, wines that tell the story of their place, their variety, and the people who nurtured them throughout the year. Wines that restore true meaning to the term terroir.