I ask her how she reacted when she was told that her vineyard had been selected among the best Cru for the Musivum line: “I was very proud, I am very attached to this vineyard, when I am there I feel regenerated, I feel it as a personal thing, there is a tradition that goes on and is repeated thanks to the cooperative winery…my grandfather used to say “this countryside is the heart of Teroldego whoever breaks this tradition makes the heart bleed,” so for us it is an important issue, of values and belonging.” Local communities custodians of a sense of belonging Then in the 1980s we joined Mezzacorona, partly because none of us dedicated ourselves exclusively to viticulture with such a small plot of land.” We had a rustic cottage near the house with a small winery where we also processed grapes from neighboring farmers, making artisanal wine. In my memories, in my childhood, this vineyard has always been there, part of the family. “We have photographs from 1906 of my father as a child, together with my grandparents, while they were harvesting grapes. I asked Mirta Menestrina, age 76, owner of two and a half hectares of Teroldego in one of the best areas of the Rotaliana plain, called the Rauti zone, and a sublime conversation ensued about the pride of belonging to a team, to a territory made up above all of people and social ties. I asked myself, what is it like to work all year round and then see one’s own grapes end up in a blend with others? Isn’t that a bit debasing? Mirta Menestrina Mirta and her centuries-old vineyard of Teroldego I wanted to meet some of these “tiles” to also understand whether this feeling of belonging to a larger design was shared by the winemakers or perhaps just my own romantic conjecture. The work of Mezzacorona as well as of other enlightened cooperatives is to carefully choose these mosaic pieces, clean them well and know how to place them where they contribute to the overall design, to the beauty of the picture. Many of them would probably leave the vineyards uncultivated or uproot them, thus losing a unique and rare landscape and environmental heritage, if they did not confer the fruits to Mezzacorona. Mezzacorona, for example, has decided to dedicate a line of boutique wines, Musivum, to the best plots, to its crus, to those special vineyards of each native variety that are carefully cultivated by forty of their bestowers, often for decades or even centuries.Ĭonsider that individual winemakers owning very small plots, sometimes less than one hectare, would never have had the economic strength, the technologies, the experience of a team of professionals to enhance their exceptional grapes with a dedicated line. Musivum, a tribute to the mosaic vineyard tiles And this is also the case with Mezzacorona, as with other large cooperatives I have visited throughout Italy and proudly recount in my books as examples of wineries with a crucial social and environmental role for certain rural areas in preserving traditions and landscape. Thank goodness and the wonder of life, reality is truth is rarely so simplistic. I will not conceal from you that many professional colleagues snub their wines regardless, as if they carry a scarlet letter on the label that would target them only to those who understand nothing about wine. Thus, the big picture is taken into consideration, without getting close enough to understand whether and with what thoroughness and care the individual tiles are chosen and treated…there is a tendency to consider these wineries “commercial” as if the adjective were negative in itself, rather than simply an indication of economic sustainability. It is a group that also includes Rotari, Tolloy and Feudo Arancio and in 2021 reached a record turnover of nearly 197 million euros, exporting more than 80 percent of what it produces to as many as 65 foreign countries.Ĭooperatives of this size are often judged on the basis of numbers and not the actual quality of the wines, according to the quantity versus quality bias. Musivum precisely means mosaic in Latin, and the winery is what at first glance would be called a colossus of the Trentino wine industry with its 1,600 members and more than 2,800 hectares under vine. I wondered about this when I started investigating the history of the Musivum project of the Mezzacorona winery in Trentino.
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