A “New” Old Grape: Spigamonti, Candidate for the Wine Mosaic Collection?

(PalatePress) - In the summer of 2000, an agronomist consultant called Claudio Oliboni was checking some vineyards in a little place called Spigamonti.  This is on a hill near the village of Negrar, in the heart the Valpolicella region. The vineyards belonged to an associate grape grower in the local cooperative, Cantina Valpolicella di Negrar. Within the rows of corvina, corvinone, rondinella and molinara (the usual, indigenous grapes of Valpolicella) Oliboni noticed that some bunches of grapes were already deeply colored, while others were still unripe.

“The bunches on the unripe vines were very sparse, the stem was red and the leaves were very dark,” Claudio Oliboni reported. Asked about the origin of this curious plant, the grape grower, whose name was Angelo Annechini, said that he didn’t know the name of this grape, which he had found a long time ago in an old courtyard. He had then successfully grafted it in his vineyard.

Curious about this discovery, Oliboni waited for the total ripeness of the unknown grape, then he picked the bunches and took them to the laboratory of the cooperative. He also notified his colleagues Denis Andreis, Emanuele Marchesini and Carlo Caliari, and the Cantina’s general manager Daniele Accordini: together they analyzed the juice of the grape. “Immediately we were impressed by the color,” Oliboni said.  “It was really intense, much more so than our other grapes.”

It took almost 14 years of research and experimentation before they could say with certainty that this uncommon grape was a totally new indigenous variety, not only for Valpolicella, but for the whole (wealthy) Italian heritage of grapes. It was named “Spigamonti” after the place where Oliboni first saw it. This grape is proving to be an quite interesting addition to Valpolicella’s wine production because it’s resistant to diseases and tolerates even the hail damage which is a recurrent problem in this zone.