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exploring taste—santa margherita gruppo vinicolo wine culture—kettmeir & méthode champenoise

Josef Romen, Director and winemaker of the Kettmeir cellar

t all started in 1919, when the founder Giuseppe Kett- sparkling wines, developing the Traditional Method that
meir, agronomy student in Wien and wine buyer in we appreciate today. ‘Bubbles were added through a second
Zurich, decided to set up a company in his homeland. fermentation in the bottle,’ Josef Romen explains to me, “The
I 60 years later, Kettmeir had become the biggest winery first cuvée was divided into: 50% Pinot Bianco, 30% Chardon-
in the South Tyrol, the first with an automated bottling plant. nay and 20% Pinot Nero. The wine, made from 1992 grapes,
th
2017 is an important year – it is the 25 anniversary of the Tra- was fermented with yeast for 24 months and first launched on
ditional Method Brut, which over the years has become one of the market in 1995”.
the most celebrated products of this winery. Even sparkling That marked the comeback of a trend for South Tyrol that
wines have their own personal history. It was 1964 when Fran- originated at the beginning of the twentieth century. Local
co, Giuseppe’s grandson, started producing his first Spumante. documentation shows that the first Spumante winery, based
At the time, he used the Charmat Method, which enhanced in Appiano, was already operational between 1902 and 1904.
the wine’s fruity and flowery characteristics. That first step was It produced Spumante from Riesling vines for the Mitteleuro-
crucial to the present – and future – of Kettmeir. pean aristocracy who spent their holidays in the area. At the
At the end of the ’80s, the production of Spumante peaked, to time it was known as 'Gold from beyond the Adige river', but
which followed a drastic drop in sales at the beginning of the the sudden outbreak of World War I halted its production. In
’90s, when wineries of sparkling wine in Champagne were so the years following the post-war economic boom, production
full of unsold bottles that they caused a slump in prices and recovered and today product awareness has also reached its
the competition became almost impossible to withstand. peak. ‘Since the beginning of the last century, South Tyrol has
Since then, Kettmeir has rethought its relationship with gone through a deep transformation in terms of wine produc-

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