Tramin

The village of Tramin gave Gewürztraminer its name, and the cooperative founded here in 1898 has spent more than a century proving the point. The grape's name means simply the spiced grape of Tramin, and although it is now grown from Alsace to New Zealand, this is where it started.

Around 300 grower families farm roughly 260 hectares on the slopes above the Adige valley, at altitudes running from 250 to 850 metres. That spread is the cooperative's greatest asset: Alto Adige is a narrow alpine valley where a few hundred metres of elevation changes everything about how a grape ripens, and every parcel here is vinified according to its site rather than pooled by variety.

Under Willi Stürz, who has led the cellar since 1992, Tramin has become one of the most decorated names in Italian white wine. Epokale, a Gewürztraminer Spätlese aged in a disused copper mine at 2,000 metres, was the first Italian white ever awarded 100 points by Wine Advocate. The region's Germanic history shows throughout, in the village names, the labels and the taste for precision.