Italy is a land of wild contrasts, and this spring I surfed them by dropping into high-altitude vineyards from the country’s deep south to the far north. One week I was sipping Carricante whites on Sicily’s Mount Etna, and the next week, Sylvaner and Riesling in the Tyrolean Alps near the Austrian border.
Here, in the largely German-speaking Isarco Valley of the Alto Adige region, are Italy’s northernmost vineyards. In these cool-climate terroirs, white wines excel.
The area’s leading wine producer is a nearly 900-year-old Augustinian monastery: Abbazia di Novacella. With its medieval towers, richly decorated cathedral, museum and cloisters, the abbey nestles at 2,000 feet among terraced vineyards that rise on glacier-formed moraine slopes.
The vineyards here—owned by the abbey or the local growers who supply it—boast eight white varieties, from Grüner Veltliner and Kerner to Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Grigio. The abbey also owns vineyards in a warmer microclimate some 25 miles south, from which it produces its red wines: Pinot Noir and local Schiava and Lagrein.
Diversity has been the hallmark of Alto Adige, which was Austrian until the end of World War I. The region’s attachment to Italy triggered a wine identity crisis that lasted into this century as locals struggled with what kinds of wines to make: Austrian or Italian? Whites or reds?
Now Alto Adige is ranked among Italy’s great zones for white wines, and there’s a movement to match its terroirs to their best-performing varieties. As part of that effort, the abbey’s professional winemaking team is focusing on a historic and sometimes misunderstood grape of Austrian origin: Sylvaner (Silvaner in Germany).
“In my opinion, Sylvaner is our grape,” says the Abbey’s longtime winemaker, Celestino Lucin, 62.
“Sylvaner has a lot of elegance and huge aging potential,” echoes marketing director Werner Waldboth, who opened a vertical of Sylvaners dating back to 2006. “You can lay it down for at least 20 years, and they just get more and more and more interesting.”
“We think Sylvaner should be the main varietal of the valley,” he adds.
These are bold statements. Top-rated examples of Sylvaner/Silvaner tend to come from Germany or France’s Alsace region. The Abbazia di Novacella has made its international reputation primarily with other whites like Grüner Veltliner, Kerner and Riesling, making it even more interesting that the winery is doubling down on Sylvaner.
This was my first vertical tasting of Sylvaner, and it erased any doubts. The wines are dry and crisp, with floral hints, a sleek mouthfeel and a salty finish. With years of aging, they become more complex with mineral and flinty notes.
Bring ’em on.
The Abbazia di Novacella is not a monastery where the monks make wine. Rather, since its founding in 1142, it has contracted the farming and viticulture to locals while the religious community studies, prays, sings and serves as parish priests through the region.
The abbey began bottling wines under its own label in the 1950s, but without much precision. One former winemaker, notes Waldboth, was a brewmaster and another was a warehouse hand.
Then, in 1997, the abbey hired Lucin, the first enologist in the job, who brought his experience working for pioneering Alto Adige producers such as the Colterenzio cooperative and Elena Walch.
“When he came, it was a revolution,” Waldboth says.
“The wines were not so great,” Lucin recalls of the five varietal whites and three varietal reds that the abbey made at the time. “But they had potential.”
He set to work modernizing the winery (which was set in an old cow barn), cut yields to prevent overcropping and invested in wood barrels and casks of different sizes. He also studied the vineyards to make selections for the abbey’s higher-end line of wines, called Praepositus.
“I’ve always been free to do what I needed,” says Lucin. “The message has always been for quality—to make wines of our terroirs and not to do what’s easy or follow fashion.”
In 2019, he launched a pair of single-vineyard wines from older vineyards: Sylvaner Stiftsgarten Alto Adige Valle Isarco and Pinot Nero Riserva Vigna Oberhof. In all, Abbazia di Novacella now makes 80,000 cases of wine annually, with 25 regular bottlings from a dozen grape varieties.
Last year, after 27 vintages (and 26 wines that scored 90 points or higher in Wine Spectator blind tastings from the 2006 vintage on), Lucin retired as the full-time winemaker. He now consults while preparing successor Lukas Ploner, 30, to take over.
Lucin leaves an impressive legacy of study and experimentation. In recent years, confronted by higher temperatures during the growing season, the abbey and its partners have been studying the terroirs for ways to avoid over-ripeness, such as by regrafting existing plantings to different varieties or moving other varieties to new sites at higher elevations.
Then there’s the abbey’s Insolitus line that Lucin began about 10 years ago when he made a batch of Sylvaner using skin-contact fermentation.
The wine was released five years ago as a one-off “orange” bottling named Hora. He followed that with other Sylvaner experiments, including the Perlae36 metodo classico sparkler; from the 2019 vintage, that wine was aged 36 months on its lees. Looking at Sylvaner from a different angle, he created Ton, an amphora-fermented and -aged blend of the 2018 and 2019 vintages.
All these wines are delicious, with a common thread of bright acidity, but Lucin hasn’t been eager to put them into regular production. Rather, he likes to show them off as demonstrations of Sylvaner’s versatility.
Not all experiments, of course, are winners. One flop, called Minus, was made from a batch of 2023 Kerner partially de-alcoholized from 13.5 percent down to 10.5 percent.
The result was a watered-down wine—but with even less character. I was let in on an interesting taste test with Lucin and Waldboth, comparing Minus with the abbey’s classic 2023 Kerner diluted with water to the same alcohol level. We agreed the latter had more aromas and flavors.
“We would never repeat this. It makes no sense,” says Waldboth of the dealcoholized wine. “If you want a wine that’s lighter, just add a couple of ice cubes or make a spritz.”
Another experiment in the works is an extreme non-intervention Sylvaner, begun last harvest with Sylvaner juice that Lucin poured into two barriques that were left in an old hillside grotto to see what would happen. Fermentation on ambient yeasts still hasn’t finished. If it does, says Lucin, the result may be bottled and released next year.
I hope to taste this one. Though I’m a recent convert to Sylvaner and the Abbazia di Novacella, I’ve quickly become a believer.
