Going Native in Northern Italy
Elena Pantaleoni expresses tradition in … where was that?
Elena Pantaleoni has spent most of her life in the middle of nowhere.
Her family’s La Stoppa estate, which she took over 25 years ago, nestles in the hills around the city of Piacenza on the western edge of Emilia-Romagna in Northern Italy. It’s a gorgeous rolling countryside of vineyards, dairy farms and wheat fields. From the estate’s 15th-century lookout tower, you can see clear north to the snowcapped Alps and south to the Apennine Mountains.
“Even in Italy, most people don’t know where it is,” says Pantaleoni of the area, which is closer to the Mediterranean port of Genoa and the business center of Milan than to Emilia-Romagna’s own regional capital of Bologna.
Obscurity is magnified by complexity. The small Colli Piacentini DOC produces 16 different wine types—including reds, whites, rosatos, frizzante and sweet wines—from international varieties like Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon to the Barbera-dominated blend with a name that sounds something like an Italian insult: Gutturnio.
The founder of La Stoppa—a Genoese lawyer who built his home here more than a century ago and ran the estate until his death in 1947—only added to the confusion, planting French varieties in the clay-based soils and unabashedly calling his top red and white wines “Bordeaux.”
Pantaleoni’s father, Raffaele, a local printer and entrepreneur, bought the estate in 1973. “He was sure that this was a place where you could make really good wine that would last,” says the soft-spoken Pantaleoni, 50, who has green eyes and an easygoing smile.
Pantaleoni’s father used the valleys for dairy cows and the higher slopes for wine. He made a range of wines from international and local grapes, and created the estate’s flagship, Macchiona, a blend of Barbera and Bonarda grapes aged in large wood casks.
When he died in 1991, he had just begun exporting to the United States. Pantaleoni was 26 and running her own bookstore in Piacenza, but she quickly decided to return home to oversee the winemaking, while her brother, Beppe, managed the livestock.
“It was the sense of responsibility to my parents and my family,” she says. “It was time to become a grownup.”
Working with estate winemaker Giulio Armani—now a 35-year veteran of La Stoppa—Pantaleoni began an ambitious program in the mid-1990s, replacing international varieties with local ones and switching to organic viticulture.
“More and more what I thought La Stoppa needed was identity,” she says. “We focused on local varieties and traditional winemaking.”
La Stoppa currently produces eight wines, but the flagship remains Macchiona, which makes up about a third of the winery's 10,000-case annual production.
“Bonarda brings a lot of tannins and little acidity. And Barbera brings acidity and little tannins,” Pantaleoni says of the blend.
Macchiona is released after two-and-a-half years in barrel and five years in bottle.
“The wine needed that time to become more elegant,” she explains. “These varieties [are] cultivated in a place that is warm with poor soils. In the beginning, they are very rustic. With time they become more elegant.”
In the last year, she and Armani have been traveling in the off-season to Chile—to which her mother had moved—to make wine from the nearly forgotten red País grape variety in the Maule and Bío-Bío valleys, where centuries-old vineyards are now making a comeback.
Pantaleoni compares the revival to her own experience at La Stoppa: “When I started—nobody cared about wines from here. Now it’s different.”
“There is more interest now in lesser-known areas,” she says. “It’s like tourism: After you have been to Florence, Venice and Rome, you say, 'I want to know the real Italy.'"