Edi Kante is the poet, painter, and resolute eccentric who helped transform the wild limestone Carso above Trieste into one of Italy's most singular white wine zones.
Backstory
Born in Prepotto in 1957 on a small farm where his father vinified a little red and white in old barrels, Kante founded his estate in 1982 and took the family winery in hand through the late 1980s. In the 1980s he tunneled deep into the limestone hillsides to build a now-legendary cellar, and from the mid-1980s, alongside a handful of neighbors, he championed the local Vitovska grape, which gained Carso DOC recognition in 1996.
The Region
The Carso, or Kras, is a sliver of Friuli just outside Trieste, where pure gray limestone soils meet the Adriatic. Vineyards face the Gulf of Trieste, and the mix of sea influence and continental climate, with the fierce Bora wind, yields grapes of powerful aromatics and high acidity.
Vineyards & Farming
The estate works around seventeen hectares of rocky, calcareous vineyards. Kante grows the indigenous whites Vitovska and Malvasia Istriana alongside international Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, plus a little Pinot Nero for rosato.
Winemaking
His spectacular cellar is carved three stories down into the bedrock, each level held at a different constant temperature by the surrounding rock. Whites typically age about a year in older barrels, then six months or more in stainless steel on the lees, and are bottled unfiltered. From 2005 he introduced Georgian amphorae to reach the essential heart of Vitovska.
The Wines
The range spans Vitovska, Malvasia, Chardonnay, and Sauvignon, plus a zero-dosage Chardonnay-Malvasia spumante and a Pinot Nero rosato. Kante even devised his own narrow-necked bottle formats to fine-tune how the wines mature.
