Giorgio Mercandelli

Giorgio Mercandelli grew up, in his own words, in a house where wine was the reason for everything: work, laughter and money. When his father died, he writes, he lost everything, until the memory of one harmonious wine changed the way he lived, worked and thought.

His father, according to the wine portal Italy's Finest Wines, owned a long-established winery in the Oltrepò Pavese. In 2003 Giorgio broke with the family firm and started his own cellar in Canneto Pavese, in the Oltrepò hills. Callmewine notes that it went by the name RiLUCE until a few years ago, before it became Cantina Alchemica. He runs it with his partner, Sonia Doria.

The farming rests on what he calls biotic philosophy, from bios and tica, the art of life. Nothing goes on the vines, by his account: no chemical, organic or biodynamic products. Italy's Finest Wines spells that out as not even the copper and sulphur organic growers use, and adds that he does not prune, fertilise or thin either. The vineyards are old, more than 150 years by his own account, and the estate counted about seven hectares when Italy's Finest Wines wrote it up. Callmewine lists Barbera, Croatina and Uva Rara for the reds and Riesling for the whites.

In the cellar everything ferments on native yeasts in inert containers, with skin macerations that can run to 120 days, and nothing is fined or filtered. Then the bottles wait. Mercandelli holds that the taste of the fruit fades once a wine is bottled, and that it takes at least five to seven years for what he calls the wine's memory to emerge. He tastes the bottles again and again before deciding when to sell them.

The range reads like an alphabet. Five vowels in five colours each stand for one cru, alongside a handful of blends such as Lanthano. Wine, in his phrase, should tell the life of the vineyard, not the taste of the fruit.