The Wine Rocket Experience

 Hi Everybody! Last week I headed to Alto Adige with Eno Club, a wine shop in Milan, to visit Girlan and the Kaltern cooperative winery.  Alto Adige has many cooperatives and almost all fo them focus on high quality wines, opposed to the rest of coops in Italy which focus on high volume, moslty inexpensive wines; of course there are exceptions. Girlan Kellerei is in Cornaiano, it works the grapes of 200 growers with 220 hectares overall making 1.3 million bottles a year. Their main focuses are Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir and Vernatsch. To incentivize quality they pay quite a lot of the grapes (up to 2.5 Euros per Kilogram!) and the winemaker also visits every vineyard, offering counsel and advising the growers to reach the perfect level of ripeness and technical characteristics needed to make each wine. The winery has grown quite a lot since its inception in 1923, the expansion has been built around the old underground cellar dating to the 16th century called T