valley surrounded by tall and terrible mountains, it makes really powerful wines." In that brief but fundamentally exhaustive description, Leonardo Da Vinci summed up Valtellina when writing his "Codice Atlantico."
The valley, located slightly more than 100 kilometers to the northeast of Milan, in the province of Sondrio, is large, green and lush, dotted with many monuments, and is dominated by mountains that are truly "tall and terrible," but they have made the inhabitants' fortunes, since they attract innumerable tourists in winter.
Carved out of the slopes that descend to the Adda river, Valtellina's vineyards produce a series of red wines that are among Lombardy's most prestigious. And they fully confirm, at a distance of five centuries, Da Vinci's lapidary description.
Winemaking has ancient origins in Valtellina. The vine was cultivated by the Etruscans and the Ligurians, the earliest inhabitants of the region, in the pre-Roman period. The valley belonged to Rhetia, a vast province that included, in addition to the Valtellina, the canton of the Grisons, the Verona district, the valley of the Adige and part of Austria. And its wines were mentioned by the greatest Latin authors, including Pliny, Cato the Elder, Martial and Virgil in his "Georgics." Viticultural continued to flourish in succeeding centuries. In the book "Raetia," published in 1616, Giovanni Guler Von Weimek, governor of Valtellina, minutely described the condition of the vineyards and the wines in his epoch.
Since then, the panorama of the vineyards has not substantially changed. Today, as then, the vineyards are for the most part planted on terraces supported by dry-stone walls. The vine-growing spaces have been wrested from the mountains, a square meter at a time, through the stubborn labor of the area's growers.
