Viti da seme - Vines from seed

@agricolaforadori is surrounded by the sheer cliff walls of the Dolomites in Trentino. Standing there elicited feelings of being small and insignificant in nature, while simultaneously sensing that life's possibilities are infinite. Is this existentialism?! I digress...

Its hard to imagine that the wines from this region were primarily bulk production during the mid 20th century. In the 1980s, Elisabetta Foradori began to change the game with a personally-curated massale selection project. In persuit of Teroldego genetic diversity, she propagated cuttings from the best vines of the old, bulk producing vineyards. Then she took it a step further at the start of the 2000s with viti da seme, growing grapevines from seeds.

Viti da seme is not some kind of shortcut on planting grafted vines. The process is 2-3x longer, in summary:
1. Choosing mother plants to collect seeds from
2. Germinating the seedlings in a greenhouse
3. Transplanting seedlings into the field and overcoming juvenility (young plants' reluctance to produce fruit) by looping the canes around in circles for 3 years
4. Choosing which plants are best after they fruit then taking cuttings from those to produce a grafted vine in the typical way
5. The grafted vines originating from vite da seme are used to fill gaps of missing vines in the Teroldego blocks, further increasing the vineyard diversity over time.

Out of all the seedlings planted in the field and looped to overcome juvenility, only 20-30% are selected for propagation into a grafted vine, 10-15% yield no fruit at all, and the remainder have undesirable attributes. A labor of love, no two ways about it.

Ancora, grazie @artigianoimports for the introduction to this family of visionaries