Foradori

History

Foradori is one of the most consequential estates in northeastern Italy, built around a single conviction: that Teroldego, long treated as a workhorse blending grape, deserved serious attention. Elisabetta Foradori took over the family estate in the 1980s as a young woman, inheriting vines on the Campo Rotaliano, the gravelly alluvial plain north of Trento where Teroldego has been grown for centuries. What she found was a grape largely farmed for yield, its identity flattened by industrial winemaking. Her response was methodical rather than dramatic: replanting with better selections, reducing yields, and rethinking the cellar from the ground up.

Over the following decades she became the producer most responsible for establishing Teroldego as a grape worth taking seriously on an international level. In parallel, she developed a separate project around indigenous and historic varieties at her Fontanasanta property in the Valle dei Laghi to the west, where Nosiola, the basis for Trentino's rare Vino Santo, grows alongside Manzoni Bianco, a cross developed in the early twentieth century by Luigi Manzoni at the Conegliano viticultural school. Her children have become involved in the estate, and the operation now encompasses both Campo Rotaliano and Fontanasanta as distinct but related chapters.

Vineyards

The core Teroldego vineyards sit on the Campo Rotaliano, a flat plain defined by deep, well-drained alluvial soils, predominantly sandy and gravelly, deposited by the Noce and Adige rivers. The plain sits at relatively low altitude for Trentino, and the combination of stony soils and good diurnal range produces Teroldego with structure and aromatic definition that high-yielding versions on the same ground rarely achieve. Foradori farms several distinct parcels here, including Sgarzon and Morei, each with its own soil texture and vine age, which the estate bottles separately to show their differences.

Fontanasanta lies in a different landscape entirely: the Valle dei Laghi, a narrow valley shaped by Lake Garda's climatic influence to the south, with limestone and clay soils and elevations that produce a cooler, more mineral-inflected growing environment. Nosiola is the traditional variety here, nearly extinct elsewhere, and it grows alongside Manzoni Bianco on sites that benefit from good sun exposure and the moderating effect of the lakes. The estate has farmed biodynamically for a number of years, though the specific certification details across all parcels are not uniformly documented in public sources.

Winemaking

Foradori's approach in the cellar changed significantly from the early 2000s onward, moving away from conventional winemaking toward amphorae and large neutral oak vessels. The Teroldego wines, including the single-vineyard Sgarzon and Morei and the broader Teroldego, are fermented with native yeasts and aged in a combination of large oak casks and clay amphorae imported from Georgia. This shift was not cosmetic: the resulting wines are less extracted and less obviously oaked than the estate's earlier style, with the variety's characteristic dark fruit and mineral edge more exposed.

The Fontanasanta wines follow a similar logic. The Nosiola undergoes an extended skin-contact maceration, producing an amber wine with texture and grip that places it clearly in the orange wine category, though Foradori has been making it long enough that it predates much of the current market enthusiasm for the style. The Manzoni Bianco from the same property sees less skin contact and reads as a more conventionally structured white, though still made with native yeasts and minimal intervention. The Lezèr wines, offered in both red and a lighter format, represent a more accessible entry point without the single-vineyard or amphora emphasis.