Pievalta

The Free Bacchus Story

Look Pievalta up in the organic register and you will not find it. The estate is certified, and the certificate is real, but it is issued to Barone Pizzini — the Franciacorta house four hundred kilometres north that founded Pievalta as its project in the Marche in 2002. Pievalta appears on it as a list of addresses: Maiolati Spontini, Cupramontana, Montecarotto, San Paolo.

That is a perfectly normal arrangement for a company farming in two regions, and it is the sort of thing that quietly defeats a check done by name. We looked for a Pievalta certificate, did not find one, and had to go through the parent company's premises list to establish that the vineyards are covered. They are.

Alessandro Fenino was the oenologist sent down from Milan to run it, and stayed. What he found was Verdicchio, the white grape of the Marche and one of the more underrated things in Italian wine: dry, firm, citrus and almond, with a faint bitterness on the finish that sounds like a fault and is actually the point — it is what stops the wine being merely pleasant. The San Paolo bottling comes off a three-hectare site facing north-east, which in central Italy is a way of keeping the acidity that the sun would otherwise cook out.

One claim does not appear on this page, and it is the one the estate is best known for. Pievalta is widely described as biodynamic, and as the first estate in the Marche to hold a Demeter certificate. Demeter Italia's own operator directory does not carry it — not under Pievalta, not under Maiolati, not under Pizzini — and neither does the international federation database. The farming may be exactly as described. But a certification is settled by the body that issues it, and on that register the entry is not there, so we say organic and stop.