Full article: https://secretsommelier.com/wine-and-climate-change/639-contra-soarda-terra
I have a lucid memory of January 2006, standing with a friend in the biting cold (-6ºC) North Italian town of Bassano del Grappa, with huddles of ladies wrapped in animal furs, generating heat with the ferocity of their chatter, and to my right the majestic mountain, from which the town gets its name, as does a familiar digestivo, itself a warming rejoinder to the icy breeze chapping my lips.
This freeze-framed memory is asserting itself because I am holding a glass of Contra Soarda’s elegantly perfumed ‘Terra’, produced within the vicinity of Bassano del Grappa. Terra is a wine blended from Merlot and Marzemino Nero. Marzemino is a very old grape variety first mentioned as part of a banquet wine list served to Pope Gregory XII on the 6 June, 1409 in Cividale, Friuli. Despite such fine lineage, ‘Terra’ is finding prestige as Europe’s first ‘carbon negative wine’.