Cantina Lavis

The town of Lavis rests on the banks of the Avisio, the river that comes down out of the Dolomites and the high Val di Cembra to join the Adige just north of Trento. Its namesake winery is a cooperative built on the same mountainous ground, whose vineyards are strung across an awkward, three-dimensional puzzle of hills, hollows and steep terraces, climbing from the valley floor to altitudes approaching 800 metres. Delicate white grapes grow on the upper slopes, where the air is cool and the nights are long, while the fuller-bodied reds sit lower down. 

The formative parts of Cantina Lavis go back to 1850, but it was only formally established as a cooperative in 1948. It has expanded from the original 14 growers by absorbing neighbouring cooperatives, and now draws fruit from a large number of smallholder member families, most of them farming little more than a hectare each. This is the characteristic shape of viticulture in these mountains, with a great many small growers, each tending a few terraced rows that would be impossible to work at scale, pooling their harvests.

A pivotal moment in the cooperative’s history came in the 1980s, when it undertook a pioneering survey of its vineyards, matching grape to soil, altitude and exposure across the whole fragmented territory, fundamentally reshaping how the region farmed.

There is a cultural thread running through the hills here too; the historic route known as the Dürer Way traces the path the painter Albrecht Dürer took in 1494 on his way south, crossing from the Adige valley over to Cembra. A line of the cooperative’s wines still carries his name. It is a reminder that these mountain passes have been routes between north and south for a very long time, and that the vineyards strung along them sit at one of the old meeting points between Italian and Alpine Europe.