Giulio Armani spends most of the year making wine for someone else, then comes home to ask a stubborn question: why should white grapes be treated any differently than red ones?
Backstory
Armani has been the winemaker at La Stoppa, one of the reference estates of the Piacenza hills, since 1980. In 2005 he founded his own label, Denavolo, on the slopes of Monte Denavolo in the commune of Travo, in the Val Trebbia.
The project began as a way to follow a single idea to its conclusion: long skin maceration of white grapes, made without compromise and bottled under his own name rather than someone else's.
The Region
Travo sits in the Colli Piacentini, the western hills of Emilia-Romagna where the Val Trebbia climbs from the Po plain toward the Apennines. It is a cool, breezy zone, far from the flat summer heat of the valley floor, and well suited to white grapes that need to hold onto their acidity. The area has a long tradition of macerated whites, which Armani pushes to its logical extreme.
Vineyards & Farming
Armani farms a small holding of vines near Travo, planted to a field blend of local and regional white varieties. The backbone is Malvasia di Candia Aromatica, joined by Marsanne, Ortrugo and a share of older, less easily identified vines. The blends are built roughly in equal parts, with Malvasia di Candia, Marsanne and Ortrugo each contributing about a quarter alongside the field-blend remainder. The vines are worked without synthetic chemistry.
Winemaking
Every Denavolo wine is white fruit vinified like a red. The grapes are destemmed and left to macerate on their skins, fermented spontaneously with indigenous yeasts and without temperature control, then aged in stainless steel. Nothing is added during the process. The maceration length is what separates the cuvees: a few days for the lightest, several months for the most serious.
That long contact with skins draws out tannin, color and aromatic depth, producing amber wines with a grip and structure that a quickly pressed white can never reach.
The Wines
The range is built around three skin-contact whites. Catavela is the most immediate, made with roughly six days on the skins. Dinavolino sits in the middle, fermenting for about two weeks then aging eight to nine months. Dinavolo is the flagship, with around six months of maceration that gives the deepest, most structured wine of the trio.
