Fattoria Zerbina

To go from square one to bottling his own wine was no mean feat for a man starting in his late 60s. Yet it would be his granddaughter, Cristina Geminiani, that put Fattoria Zerbina on the map. In a parallel life this headstrong but eminently hospitable woman might have become a marine biologist, but in 1987 she embraced the challenge of making something truly distinctive in a region stuck between obscurity and a reputation for mediocre mass production. After studying agriculture at the University of Milan she progressed to enology at the University of Bordeaux. It “completely changed my perspective on life,” she says, “filling me with enormous energy” to prove that this corner of Romagna could be more than a viticultural backwater.

In fact, Marzeno’s literal backwater geography turned out to harbor one of the rarest (and riskiest) possibilities in winemaking: the chance to flirt with noble rot. The Marzeno creek winds its way toward the meandering Lamone river amid a patchwork of fields and vineyards speckled with small ponds and country reservoirs, filling the mornings with a moisture upon which Botyris cinerea thrives. Then, just as crucially, afternoons bring stiff southeast winds that dry grape clusters before the prized fungus can spin out of control.

Attempting a noble rot wine with Albana, a locally indigenous grape that had been disparaged “forever,” was the kind outside-of-the-box thinking that verged on out-of-your-mind. But by means of “ruthless selection” at harvest—sometimes sorting at the level of individual grapes—from widely-spaced vines pruned to expose clusters to breezy sunshine, Cristina earned a reputation as a veritable godmother of the Albana varietal. Her noble rot Scacco Matto passito is now so jealously prized by Emilia-Romagna’s chefs that it’s virtually impossible to find outside of the region’s top restaurants, but its cousin cuvée Arrocco bears the same signature: honeyed apricots and candied orange sparked by a livewire acidity that caps the mid-palate sweetness with a drying finish.

In the last decade Cristina has cemented her reputation as Albana’s leading champion with the fully dry Bianco de Ceparano. From vineyards planted at double to triple the density of her passito vines, and a totally different canopy management that shades the berries, she obtains a crisp, high-toned white that highlights the “aromatic precursors” of the late-harvest passito wines—the citric character swinging toward grapefruit zest, flowers in place of honey, energized by a persistent seaside salinity.

But Fattoria Zerbina does not begin and end with that single grape. This landscape remains largely “unknown” to outsiders, Cristina says. But over the last 35 years she has come to appreciate—and lean into—its heterogeneity. Her long-term project has been to chart her clay, limestone, and chalk soils with increasing precision, and match each micro-plot with the rootstocks, varietal clones, vine densities, and training systems that best express the “wild and silent beauty” of her ancestral homeland. So even as she charted a renaissance for Albana, Cristina was overhauling the estate’s Sangiovese. Planting at densities up to 8,400 vines/hectare—compared to Vicenzo’s mid-century standard 3,000—she veered toward the “avant-garde” by implementing albarello, an “antique low-trained bush system” that maximized the vines’ resilience to the wind. Which gave her a starting point.

“Over the years I have greatly refined my knowledge of clones, micro-vinifying the ones from Romagna and the massal selections of my grandfather, and comparing them with some clones of Chianti Classico and Brunello.” She has also experimented with Tuscan and French rootstocks—likewise examining their performance in the soil of each meticulously characterized site. (It doesn’t hurt that her husband, Alessandro Masnaghetti, is a vineyard mapper of international renown.) As blended into the Torre di Ceparano—with small drops of Merlot and indigenous Ancellotta—the result is an open, inviting, fruit-forward Sangiovese with softer tannins than one finds in Chianti, but a wind-sculpted structure that imparts a focal tension that’s at the heart of the house style.    

Birthplace doesn’t carry the weight it once did. For Cristina, her grandfather’s turned out to matter more than her own. But as she presses toward an ever-more-intimate understanding of Fattoria Zerbina’s complexly quilted vineyards, her untiring willpower shows that one thing never really changes: destiny is what you make of it.