For sixty years, Santa Margherita has been setting the style for Italian Pinot Grigio
24 • 02 • 2021

For sixty years, Santa Margherita has been setting the style for Italian Pinot Grigio

Sixty years ago, Santa Margherita’s Pinot Grigio made its debut: a new, elegant, modern wine that launched a real revolution in taste and in wine-drinking pleasure. In these first sixty years of history, Pinot Grigio has become the leading Italian white varietal wine worldwide, and the Pinot Grigio from Santa Margherita continues to be its flagship: a wine that has made a huge contribution to the development of Italian winemaking, revolutionizing both the national and foreign markets. Every day, thousands of bottles of Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio are uncorked around the world: a great success story “Made in Italy”, whose roots date back to the last century.

 

It all began towards the end of the 1950's when, in anticipation of future trends, the visionary Count Gaetano Marzotto set out in search of a new type of wine that would break out of the cliché and for the first time decided to ferment Pinot Grigio without its skins. It was cultivated in what would later prove to be his chosen area: Trentino-Alto Adige. The result was an elegant, intense, fresh and fruity white wine, unique in its kind. Its success was as surprising as it was immediate: from its debut on the Italian market in 1961 to 1979, when it was crowned "the best white wine of Italy", the doors of the great American market were opened wide to it, where it quickly established itself as a new icon-wine, fostering an unprecedented brand loyalty, and where it is still today the most imported and appreciated Italian white wine.

 

Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio has quite rightly entered the wine Hall of Fame, presenting itself today in a thoroughly modern, versatile style: a straw yellow color, a clean, intense nose, with unexpected floral notes and hints of citrus and white-fleshed fruit; freshness and tanginess in perfect balance, giving way to fruit on the palate that is at once delicate and stimulating.
Thanks to its harmony, Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio reveals itself to be a wine of great character, which is extremely versatile when accompanying food or in different situations: as an aperitif, with brunch, drunk throughout a meal and, in particular, with lots of dishes belonging to the Italian or other culinary traditions, whether fish-based or otherwise.

 

That of Santa Margherita’s Pinot Grigio is a dream made great, especially by the best practices adopted both in the vineyards and in the winery, such as the protection of biodiversity, reforestation, and self-sufficiency in energy produced from renewable sources, with the conviction that everything that derives from a healthy environment - managed in a rational, measured way which respects the cycles of nature - has a very special worth.
Particular attention has been paid to local sourcing, so that today over 90% of the bottles are produced in the glass factory only a short distance away from the vinification facility, and to the “carbon neutrality” program, which for the last seven years has reduced to zero the carbon footprint of the almost 2 million bottles of Pinot Grigio that are produced annually.

 

Combining craftsmanship, tradition, and technical and enological innovation has therefore allowed Santa Margherita to highlight to the full the relationship between the grape variety and its terroir and to offer an outstanding Pinot Grigio that finds its way onto the tables of over 90 countries throughout the world. It is a wine that invented a new approach to wine, that has always been in step with the times and which, even in the year in which we are celebrating its first sixty years of success, is already plotting new routes of taste and vinous pleasure for the future.

 

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