Biography
The cooperative winery of San Michele Appiano, otherwise known as the Kellereigenossenshaft Sankt Michael Eppan, has just celebrated, with great ceremony, the hundredth anniversary of its founding. Founded during the age of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it is the cooperative cellar of the village of San Michele, one of the hamlets of the township of Appiano on the South Tyrolean Wine Road, the most important viticultural township of the Alto Adige region of northern Italy. Created by twenty cultivators, it has constantly grown in size, becoming one of the largest coops of the province of Bolzano with 355 associates and 875 acres of vineyards, 70% cultivated to white grapes. The cellars themselves are an old building in period style with ample underground spaces, recently enlarged and embellished with a new, more modern wing. The fortunes of the cooperative changed radically in 1977 with the arrival of cellar master-oenologist Hans Terzer, who imposed a production philosophy based on rigor and selection according to which grapes are no longer paid on the basis of quantity but on their quality potential. Thanks to this decision, a difficult one to accept at the time, Terzer succeeded in completely changing the production policy and the image of the cellar, offering an example to all of the other cooperatives of the Trentino-Alto Adige region, and not merely this region. San Michele has won a great success both with the public and with critics, particularly by the creation of a product line named Sankt Valentin (the name of a castle surrounded by vineyards on Appiano Monte) which includes a series of full and fragrant varietal white wines such as the Sauvignon (the only Italian white won to wine the highest rating in the “Gambero Rosso guide to Italian wine” for thirteen years in a row), the Gewürztraminer, the Pinot Grigio, and the Pinot Bianco. The line was extended, somewhat later, to red wines such as the Pinot Noir and Lagrein. And yet, one of the standard-bearers of the cellar is Schulthaus, a milestone in the oenology of the region, a pure Pinot Blanc produced from the vineyards of the estate of the same name, two hundred thousand bottles each and every year. A wine which demonstrates that a great wine need not be rarity for a few, but widely available to a large public of wine lovers.