One man and his extraordinary cellar: the Luigi Veronelli story

Most of us know someone who is fastidious about the quality of what they eat and drink. But I can think of only one such person who was so influential that he virtually created modern wine and promulgated the principles of gastronomy throughout his native land: Luigi Veronelli, an Italian self-proclaimed anarchist who died in 2004.

Today we take the likes of Sassicaia and the intricate network of crus in Barolo and Barbaresco for granted. Likewise the freshness of Friulian whites. Veronelli claimed credit for them and much else — with justification in many cases. His vast cellar is the current target of Edinburgh-based Italophile importer Zubair Mohamed of Raeburn Fine Wines, who would like to share its impeccably stored treasures more widely. Last December I attended a lunch in London organised by Mohamed to show Veronelli’s family how much interest there would be in the collection.

Veronelli’s word, whether in newspapers, magazines or on TV, was so powerful that in 1977 he managed to get Coca-Cola banned from Italy, temporarily but entirely, because, he argued, its ingredients were industrial and not nourishing. He needed police protection for some months.

He was born into a prosperous Milanese family in 1926, studied philosophy and always wanted to write. Graduating in a country recovering from the war, he applied to Il Giorno, a Milan-based newspaper, to write about philosophy. That post was already filled, so it was suggested he might like to write about his other interests. Thus was born Italy’s most powerful gastronomic critic.

For him, food and drink were philosophical and, above all, cultural. Wine and food (he was an important restaurant critic) were pretexts for writing about society. He travelled throughout Italy, encouraging small-scale producers and railing against the increasing prevalence of wine production on an industrial scale.

In the early 1950s, he visited all the major French wine regions to understand why French wine was then regarded as the best. Returning to Italy, he argued for a proper set of rules in the image of France’s Appellation Contrôlée system, which laid down strict production criteria and clearly identified and glorified the best vineyard sites.

In 1963, Italy’s Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) was introduced, but in such a watered-down, lax form that Veronelli spurned it. His increasingly influential writing focused instead on the high-quality vini da tavola that emerged in the 1970s: wines such as Sassicaia, Tignanello and Le Pergole Torte that were defiantly produced outside the DOC system as table wines.

Veronelli’s next seminal voyage was to California in 1982 where he was impressed by the use of small French oak barrels, as advocated by the oenologist André Tchelistcheff. As a result, Italian wine producers turned from the large old Slavonian casks that had been de rigueur and embarked on a love affair with barriques. France’s coopers owe him a great deal. Ever curious and in search of authenticity, in 1989 he visited Georgia, the cradle of viticulture and, for Veronelli, the cradle of humanity.

He made many enemies, producers too slick to be of interest or smaller ones he unaccountably ignored. But they were outnumbered by his acolytes, an army of ambitious wine producers who sought his guidance — and sometimes even his psychological counsel, according to his youngest daughter Lucia, whose husband Gian Arturo Rota has spent years sorting out the Veronelli archive and now holds the key to his remarkable cellar.

Veronelli moved from Milan to a busy family home in the narrow medieval streets of upper Bergamo in 1970 and, with his increasing prominence, needed a capacious cellar for the bottles he was sent for assessment. (He never scored wines himself but published many a guide to them.) He excavated, with explosives, to a depth of 20 feet. The cellar’s rock walls, with just two small, north-facing vents, maintain the temperature at 13 or 14 Celsius and the relative humidity is kept suitably high. He designed special concrete bins, 1,700 of them, to hold the multiple bottles of each wine he intended to study over time.

There are still 35,000 bottles in the cellar, and no lift. The family discussed the possibility of selling the collection with Sotheby’s in New York in 2013 but the auction house was overwhelmed by the sheer size of it.

Mohamed is made of sterner stuff. By early 2020, he had persuaded the family to let him have some of the collection, but disaster struck. The whole trailer exploded en route to the UK and burnt to a frazzle. Since then he has successfully shipped some of Veronelli’s wines to selected London clubs and restaurants and would eventually like to see some in retail.

The cellar really is an archive of the progress of Italian wine, stuffed with bottles unavailable elsewhere. The oldest bottle, a 1785, was stolen but there is Chianti Classico aplenty from the 1970s when the softening technique of converting harsh malic acid (then considerable in these Tuscan reds) into softer lactic acid was relatively unknown. One exciting wine served at the London lunch was an initial experimental 1975 Riserva from the Capannelle estate that was never released but was sent to Veronelli (and the famous Florence restaurant Enoteca Pinchiorri) for their comments.

Another was a Capitel Monte Fontana 1977 Recioto della Valpolicella Classico from Tedeschi, a very early promoter of the single-vineyard wines that are now ubiquitous. There was also a jeroboam of a 1974 Barbaresco Riserva from Alfredo and Giovanni Roagna, their first Riserva and 100 per cent from the famous Pajè cru, although in those days the names of Piemontese crus were known only to locals.

Surprisingly, red wine constitutes less than half the bottles in the Veronelli cellar, with Friuli the second-biggest category, and 12 per cent rosato, say the family. Veronelli was a major promoter of the fresh, temperature-controlled whites that emerged from Friuli from the 1970s. Their pioneer, Mario Schiopetto, was Veronelli’s most garlanded producer, and Veronelli followed many of his experiments, such as making wines without the preservative sulphur dioxide as long ago as the 1970s.

According to Rota and cellarmaster Luca Mazzoleni, the whites have aged better than the reds, but the wines tend to taste 10 years younger than expected. That was certainly borne out by most of the 11 wines served at Mohamed’s lunch.

So far bottles have left the cellar only for special presentations but Mohamed is doing his best to extract more, even if they all have to be painstakingly carried upstairs.

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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