Alois Lageder Versalto Pinot Bianco 2024
£21.75
The wine
An aromatic Pinot Bianco with fruity notes of pear, apple and peach layered with delicate mineral overtones. Elegant and linear, with a fresh and lively finish. Pinot Bianco is the grape Alto Adige does better than anywhere.
Versalto is the fuller expression of Pinot Bianco in the range, from higher vineyards and given more time on its lees. Lees ageing means leaving the wine on its spent yeast cells after fermentation, which adds a creamy weight and a subtle savoury depth without any oak being involved at all.
The producer
Alois Lageder
View all Alois Lageder winesSix generations of one family. Johann Lageder laid the foundation stone in 1823, trading wine alongside his work as a wagon maker, and his successors bought vineyards and began making the wine themselves. In 1934 the family acquired the Löwengang estate at Magrè, still the headquarters today.
From the 1990s Alois Lageder set out to reach a level of quality that was pioneering not only for the winery but for Alto Adige as a whole, and the estate has been the reference point for biodynamic farming in northern Italy ever since. Biodynamics goes beyond organic practice, treating the farm as a single organism and following a calendar of preparations and lunar timings; whatever one makes of the philosophy, the viticulture it demands is unusually attentive.
Alto Adige is Italy's most northerly wine region, German-speaking, and the vineyards climb the slopes above the Adige valley from around 200 metres to well over 800. That range of altitude in a small area is what lets a single estate make convincing Pinot Grigio, Gewürztraminer, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Lagrein, each planted where it belongs rather than where it is convenient.
