In the 1990s, after Stefano Inama joined his father making white wines at their family winery in northeastern Italy, a friend poured him three glasses of red wine.
The vineyards of Italy’s Veneto have a long tradition of Bordeaux varieties, so it wasn’t unusual that the first two glasses were a varietal Cabernet Sauvignon and a Merlot from the nearby Colli Berici slopes, not far from Vicenza.
“The wines were very good,” Inama recalls.
But then his friend poured the third wine from an unmarked bottle, and the next moments changed his life.
“It was love at first taste,” Inama gushes. “It had these fantastic spices and smooth tannins. It was the wine of my dreams.”
The wine was made from Carmenère, a difficult-to-cultivate traditional Bordeaux blending variety that was once thought to be near-extinct.
In fact, Carmenère from the 19th century was preserved under cover in a couple of places around the globe. Most notably, it was flourishing in Chile, where vintners—who once thought it was Merlot—have turned it into the country’s signature red grape.
The other Carmenère hotspot was the Veneto, where it was planted at around the same time by Italian workers returning from South America or France. Here, until relatively recently, it was thought to be Cabernet Franc, one of Carmenère’s genetic parents.
In the last 30 years, Inama, who is best known for Soave Classico whites, has become Europe’s modern Carmenère forefather—planting it in and singling out limestone terroirs to bring out the grape’s highest potential.
“There is no other project like this in Europe,” says Stéphane Derenoncourt, the Bordeaux-based consultant who has been working with Inama since 2017. “To find another, you have to go to South America.”
Inama, 65 and now working with his three sons, is a man driven by wine obsessions both on his home turf and 300 miles south in central Italy where he helped found Binomio for Montepulciano d’Abruzzo reds.
“Wine is not business—it’s love,” says Inama, standing atop a five-acre limestone slope in the Colli Berici that he planted to Carmenère in spring 2024.
This hillside is surrounded by the forestlands of a regional park; before he bought it, the slope was used by a neighbor to produce hay for his farm cows.
While touring the area with Inama after taking on the consulting job, Derenoncourt instinctively identified the plot as potentially ideal for Carmenère because of its southern exposure, stony soils, elevation and drying winds. Such a microclimate, he sensed, would help the thin-skinned grape ripen and protect it from the nemesis that helped drive it from Bordeaux: late-season botrytis mold.
Beyond that, Inama enthuses, “Here, I get the vibrations. I want to be in this place.”
The Colli Berici—a short drive from appellations like Valpolicella and Soave—is a sleepy viticultural spot where many growers are content to produce grapes for large Prosecco makers.
Standing in contrast is Inama. In the 1990s, he and his father, Giuseppe, blended Carmenère from a vineyard around the family home into wines like the Cabernet Sauvignon– and Franc-based Bradisismo.
Inama’s breakout Carmenère moment came in the 2004 vintage, when the men produced their first varietal Carmenère, called Oratorio di San Lorenzo (2004 vintage, 93 points, $65) from a small, remote vineyard on red clay soils.
Inama followed up with an entry-level wine called Carmenère Più in the subsequent vintage, and in 2015 produced the first vintage of Carminium, a simpler wine than Oratorio San Lorenzo from younger, adjacent plots.
Inama’s latest Carmenère chapter began in 2017, when he was searching for ways to take his winemaking to another level. “I said that if we want to achieve the maximum, we need someone else to come in from outside,” Inama explains.
That someone was Derenoncourt, who helped Inama and his sons revamp their red winemaking by seeking optimally ripe fruit, moving to whole-berry fermentations in concrete vats, conducting longer but gentler extractions, and making a rigorous selection of oak barrels and casks for aging.
The Inamas also separated parcels of Carmenère in the Bradisismo vineyard to conduct micro-vinifications. They discovered that the wine made from limestone-dominant parcels at the top of the hill was far more elegant and complex than the wine from lower slopes.
“The stones made a completely different wine,” Inama marvels.
The result of those experiments is a new limited-production, high-end wine called Capital, of which about 125 to 160 cases are being made per vintage. The debut 2021, which blends this selection of Carmenère with 15 percent Cabernet Franc, is due out in 2025.
“We are not in a rush,” says Inama.
At the Inama winery, in the flat, industrial area of his hometown of San Bonifacio, he and his son Matteo, Inama’s general manager, taste through these early vintages of Capital. The wines are medium-bodied, rich and exuberant at the same time, sleek and loaded with spicy complexity.
Contrasting the wine with Oratorio San Lorenzo, Matteo, 43, says, “San Lorenzo is a wine of clay. Capital is a wine of pure rock.”
Derenoncourt, by telephone from Bordeaux, puts it this way, “On the limestone, you don’t only taste Carmenère, you taste the place.” He adds, “The challenge for Stefano is to start a new tradition of Carmenère.”
In the last four years, with his sons running every aspect of Inama from production to sales, Inama says he’s found a new job: walking the vineyards to understand their evolution—in particular his 40 acres of Carmenère.
“If you don’t walk in the vineyards every day—vine by vine—you don’t see the movie,” he says. “You just see a photograph.”
“I can now say I know Carmenère,” he reflects. “We are proud to say we took Carmenère someplace.”
