Perla del Garda bets on a future under the sign of the organic: the successes of productions like the Lugana Bio, selected for the Merano Wine Festival 2018 where it won the Award for the second consecutive year, pushed the winery led by Giovanna Prandini with his brother Ettore to accelerate the process of global conversion to organic. The choice will therefore concern the entire company vineyard, now rising to a total of 34 hectares from the original 23, of which 8 have already been certified.
“A very important step for us, that we decided to undertake with the advice of the SATA agronomic group and in particular of Marco Tonni (pictured above with Giovanna Prandini), now a guarantee in the field of organic not only in Lombardy but on a national level: from the verification of experiences in past years we have decided to start the conversion for the entire estate, a five-year plan to get to a 100% certified organic production. While waiting, we will expand the range with the Madre Perla 2016 Bio: a Lugana reserve that we have officially presented at Vinitaly 2019 “.
Organic is not a common choice in Lugana.
“But for us it is not an ideological act, we want to experiment and dare in a path of serious and transparent research that also contemplates the evaluation of all aspects related to the environmental impact, keeping faith with our original qualitative challenge: all we wanted since the beginnings was to become an excellence in the Lugana field, and today we are the only ones to decline it in all types with seven labels representing 90% of production “.
Perla del Garda is today a reality of 150 thousand bottles, with a strong growth on foreign markets for an export share which in 2018 reached a quota of 37% of the total turnover against 20% of 2017.
“The growth in volumes has led us to open up more to German-speaking markets where we have almost doubled our sales: a reason for great satisfaction, also in future perspective, considering that the goal is to grow further and reach 200 thousand bottles” .
In the meantime, 2018 harvest has ended and the results are strongly positive.
“An extraordinary campaign from the quantitative point of view, and we believe also from the quality side: we are composing the cuvées of wines that we will present on the market from January 2019, there really seems to be all the conditions for a great vintage, able to enhance the strong connotation of a terroir in a hilly area that expresses itself differently from the clayey areas near the lake: our skeleton of stony soils not so rich in water brings to the bottle characteristics of minerality and sapidity that result in an identity of complexity and pleasure that has now become a bit our trademark “.
But Perla del Garda is also olive oil: in the company’s range there is also a small production of extra virgin olive oil that comes from olives of 700 owned plants. “The crushing – emphasizes Giovanna Prandini – is carried out in the Frantoio Monte Croce in Desenzano by the friend Paolo Venturini, the final production is destined to become our Garda Dop extra virgin olive oil”.
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