Longevity

Wine archive

Wine has a soul.
It needs love, care and also a few small secrets. One of the secrets at Cantina Terlano is the Wine Archive. About 13 meters underground, it is a valuable store of some 100,000 wines of every vintage from 1955 to the present plus a few that are even older.

What began as an experiment for our former winemaker Sebastian Stocker, who quietly put aside 500 bottles of every vintage to see whether his theory concerning the longevity of Terlano wines was correct, is now Terlano’s best-kept treasure. The white wines, some of them over fifty years old, continue to astonish wine professionals with their breathtaking freshness, fine acidity, and absolutely faultless aroma. That makes them much sought after by leading sommeliers in the most exclusive restaurants. The Wine Archive is often compared to a library: It serves to store the annual editions, but it is also a collection that permits comparisons to be drawn. And the collection can now be used to study developments in wine and winemaking and to gain a better feeling for the fundamentals and nature of wine. Terlano’s oldest bottle, by the way, dates back to 1893, the year in which the winery was founded. Whether and on what occasion that bottle will be opened is another of those little secrets.