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After our visit to the Gronell boot factory, the next stop on our "day of tours" was the Bertani winery. Located in the community of Grezzana in the Valpolicella Valpantana, one valley over from the boot factory, it was an easy and short twenty-five minute drive. We arrived at the elegant-looking orange-stuccoed facility just in time for our 2pm appointment.

Arriving at Bertani

Daniel and Hanne decided to skip the wine tour. Instead, they would take the rental car and visit Verona for a few hours. This worked out well, since it meant that we'd have a sober person to drive the car after our wine tour (because as you may have guessed, the wine tour involves a wine tasting, which can involve some degree of inebriation).

After Daniel and Hanne drove off, we walked through the gates of Bertani's Grezzana facility, into a wide and tidy courtyard. Our tour guide, Michela, soon came out and greeted us.

Winery Entrance

Asmir and Bertani

Grezzana Facility

If you happen to be someone who's read my 2010 europe trip report, you may find the names Bertani and Michela familiar. That's because we also did a wine tour with Bertani back then, and we also had Michela as our tour guide. The only difference was the location: in 2010, we toured Bertani's Villa Novare estate. Due to a change in ownership, the tours were now given here, at Bertani's main facility.

courtesy JInnes

Introducing Michela

As a sommelier and viticulturist for Bertani, Michela has likely met with countless visitors. That she even remembered Jenn and I at all was to me quite surprising, but also quite nice.

Glass-lined tanks

We got straight into the tour. Michela first brought us to some rooms on the main floor of the buildings - rooms that had modern-ish looking tanks made of brushed stainless steel or of glass-lined concrete. She started off giving us a bit of a rundown of Bertani's place in the wine-making world. As it turns out, Bertani is a relatively small player in the worldwide winery industry, and much of it - including the facility we were now visiting - was recently aquired by Tenementi Angelini, an Italian company that has multiple holdings including several in the wine sector (this change was part of the reason that Villa Novare is no longer where the wine tours are held).

Stainless steel vats

Asmir and lots of steel

French Oak Vat

The Bertani company was founded in 1857 - a few years before Italy was yet to become a unified country, and the Grezzana facility is Bertani's original and oldest. If you want to understand the history of the company, this location was/is arguably more important than Villa Novare.

In addition to showing some of the newer storage units on the main floor, she also escorted us past preserved remnants of old wine-making machinery, marketing material, and offices.

In the old days...

Huge and Old

Old Winemaking gear

courtesy JInnes

Stamps from bygone era

Old Gear

Old Shipping Office

Royal wedding connection

Artistic Bottle Display

Evil Smile

We were led down to the basement level, where atmospheric stone-vaulted ceilings arched above innumerable rows of wooden fermenting barrels of every conceivable size.

In addition to the historical company talk, Michela also focused attention on the nature of the winemaking itself, pointing out the various types of wooden fermenting barrels we were seeing, of what type of wood they were made (typically Slavonian or French oak), and of their effects on the resulting wines.

Beautiful old cellar

Fusto barrels

Fermenting Amarone

More Fusto Veronese Barrels

Valpolicella seal

A particularly deep and dark corner of the large cellar was devoted to wine storage. Here, a dimly-lit corridor of open concrete stalls held a vast (and no doubt very expensive) collection of Bertani wines, dating back over a period of over 80 years. Each stall had a date labelled with white chalk, and a hanging ledger sheet showed exactly when a batch of wine was taken from the cellar, where it was sent, how many bottles were taken, etc.

This was a very neat place to be. In each stall, the bottles were simply stacked on top of one another up to a depth of about 20 bottles deep. Must have been quite a lot of pressure on the lowest bottles! All of the bottles were unlabelled, and some of them showed the grime, cobwebs, and dirt of decades of storage. When a batch of bottles is retrieved from the cellar for sale, only then are the bottles are cleaned and the labels affixed.

The Wine Cellar

Old Vintages

Decades of cobwebs

I was honored by the trust Michela and the company were placing in letting us come into this space.

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