Some of the most interesting bottles in natural wine emerge from partnerships between producers and the people who love what they make. Randi for Vinovore is one of those collaborations -- a meeting between an Italian family winery in Romagna with deep roots in indigenous viticulture, and a Los Angeles shop built around the conviction that wine made with intention, by people who care, is worth seeking out wherever it comes from.
Backstory
Azienda Agricola Randi was established in Fusignano in the Romagna region of Emilia-Romagna after World War II, growing into a 63-hectare estate across the municipalities of Fusignano and Alfonsine near Ravenna. The winery is now led by Massimo Randi, who manages the estate with a focus on structured, terroir-driven wines from native Romagna varieties. Vinovore was founded in 2017 by Coly Den Haan, one of Los Angeles's first female sommeliers, as a wine shop in the Silver Lake neighbourhood dedicated to wines made by women. Den Haan, a winemaker herself, developed the Vinovore house label through a collaboration with Randi, commissioning ancestral-method sparkling wines built on the estate's indigenous grapes.
The Region
Fusignano sits on the flat Po Delta plain near Ravenna in Romagna, where sandy and gravelly alluvial soils and a continental climate with warm summers and cold winters define the growing conditions. The area is the heartland of several obscure Romagna-native varieties, notably Famoso and Centesimino, which have survived largely because of family estates like Randi that never abandoned them for more fashionable options.
Vineyards and Farming
Randi farms with integrated pest management practices, prioritising sustainability and the expression of indigenous varieties. The estate grows Trebbiano, Famoso, Centesimino, Longanesi, Malbo Gentile, Sauvignon, and Chardonnay across its 63 hectares. For the Vinovore collaboration, the focus falls on the rarest indigenous varieties -- Famoso, a pale-berried white grape nearly lost to history, Centesimino, a dark-skinned red, and Longanesi, a thick-skinned red peculiar to the Ravenna area.
Winemaking
The Vinovore wines are made using ancestral methods -- the ancient approach of bottling wine while still fermenting and allowing the secondary fermentation to finish in bottle, creating natural carbonation without disgorgement. Fermentation uses spontaneous native yeasts. Wines are unfiltered, low in sulfite, and produced in limited quantities, reflecting both the character of the vintage and the scarcity of these varieties on the market.
The Wines
The Vinovore range from Randi includes Cosmic Juice, a red pet-nat built on Longanesi grown on sand and gravel soils near Ravenna; Electric Lightning, a rose pet-nat; and Desert Night, a white pet-nat. The labels carry Den Haan's aesthetic -- playful, direct, and unapologetically irreverent -- wrapped around wines that are serious about the land they come from.