Domaine Vento - Alessandro del Grosso

My first attempt at winemaking dates back to 2013, in a small winery in western Liguria, in Cesio. There, I took my first steps with Dolcetto and Pigato and learned the rudiments of peasant winemaking. No oversight, no conscience, very few tools.

Over the years, the tools haven't changed, but the knowledge has evolved. I began studying the world of wine, which I discovered to be a field, a way of doing things, a philosophy that I believe has many similarities with my youthful studies: geology. Both sciences have stable pillars on which the foundations of the subject are built, and an indefinable area where everything is left to intuition, to external and internal events, to the myriad variables that cannot be determined a priori.
For a long time, I kept wine as a hobby, working in Milan as a videographer and taking advantage of my flexibility to knock on the doors of many producers like Angiolino Maule, Stefano Bellotti, Nino Perrino, and others who inspired me and from whom I tried to learn as many secrets as possible.
After my career as a director ended, I began to explore wine, seeing it from the perspective of those who offer it, those who taste it, and those who sell it. I moved to Denmark and began working in the restaurant industry. This was an extremely important and crucial step, giving me the opportunity to taste countless different wines, to develop my tastes, and to begin exploring the world of French wine. After about two and a half years, and with the advent of Covid, I decided to return to Italy to begin dedicating myself more to the vineyard while still keeping one foot in the restaurant business.
My first real foray into the wine industry came in 2021 when, somewhat crazily, Nicoletta Bocca of San Fereolo decided to take a chance on me by hiring me for a few months as her cellar assistant. This was a truly momentous event in my personal and winemaking journey.
Once the experience was over, I returned to the city to start working in a legendary Milanese wine shop, with which we organized a trip to Roussillon that would astonish me.
The terroir, the union between the producers, the exotic nature and the prices of the vineyards made me think about a possible path that I had never considered before: moving and creating my own winery in the south of France.
It was in the summer of 2022 that I managed to snatch three months of work from one of the area's rock stars, Jean Philippe Padiè, at his Domaine, which would later become an occasional collaboration, still active today, but above all a friendship.
Thus was born Vento, my small winery, which today has just over two and a half hectares and a production of around 2000 bottles for the '23 vintage, when I had one hectare.

My winemaking today includes only 3 tools: temperature, oxygen and sulfur dioxide when necessary.
For the first, since I don't have much availability or quantity, I mainly use large bottles of frozen water.
For oxygen I use my nose and remain generous at the beginning of the winemaking process until I get to playing with a slight reduction to preserve the evolution of the wine.
I use sulfur dioxide only when the wine has finished all the main fermentations, alcoholic and malolactic, but not before.