Monte delle Vigne

When Paolo Pizzarotti took over a modest estate in the Colli di Parma in 1983, he didn’t inherit a winery — he inherited a responsibility. Farming organically from the very beginning, long before certification existed, he set out to restore the hills of Ozzano Taro to the wine landscape of the past. Central to that restoration was Lambrusco Maestri, a grape native to Parma that had long been overshadowed by the region’s better-known varieties.

 

In 2012, Monte delle Vigne released their  first Lambrusco DOC Colli di Parma made from Lambrusco Maestri — a wine Ian d’Agata called “the most fruity, creamy, and immediately appealing Lambrusco, if not also the deepest and most complex of them all.” It was a declaration: Parma’s Lambrusco deserved to be taken seriously on its own terms.

 

That conviction now runs through the estate’s full Lambrusco program, where they craft distinct expressions of what this native variety can achieve when it’s grown with care and produced with intelligence rather than industrial efficiency. In the vineyard, certified organic farming, precision agriculture, and natural water management reflect a philosophy that views quality and sustainability as inseparable. The estate’s geothermal underground cellar was designed so that winemaking follows gravity and nature rather than fighting them. The result is Lambrusco that tastes unmistakably like its place — structured, layered, and rooted in a corner of Emilia that the wider wine world is only beginning to discover.

 

In the early 19th century the cooperative system was very important given small individual vineyard holdings and the economic hardships of The Great Depression. It was nearly impossible for growers to produce wine for an entire region on their own.  For over a century Cantina Carpi e Sorbara have continued along those same lines and currently work with 1200 different cooperative farmers to produce Lambrusco in each of the significant D.O.C.’s