Donato Lanati

Coming Up

Early in his career, Donato Lanati was director at Meraviglia, a school of oenology in Piemonte, Italy (from 2005). The work there treated wine as a field of study as much as a craft, grounded in method, discipline, and inherited knowledge. From that base, his practice moved into more explicitly research-led and advisory work. He became patron at Enosis, center of oenological consultancy and research in Fubine, Italy (from 2013), a position that implies both oversight and technical rigor, and consultant oenologist at Colle Manora in Fubine, Italy (from 2013), where cellar decisions and vineyard realities met in daily practice.

Where They Are Now

Lanati serves as chief enologist at Badagoni in Georgia, placing him at the point where grape, site, and intention have to hold together in the glass. “I believe that the wine of the future will be the one that makes the mind soar into the landscape from which it was born,” he says. The line is a concise statement of method: wine is not treated as an object apart from its site, but as a readable expression of terrain, climate, and memory.

Signature

Donato's signature wines include Mimosa. The name suggests ease, but the wine is defined by control and a clear point of view. In Lanati’s work, signature does not mean ornament; it means arriving at a style that is legible, restrained, and tied to place.

In Their Words “I believe that the wine of the future will be the one that makes the mind soar into the landscape from which it was born.” Taken together, the two lines map the work: one looks to place as the measure of future wine, and the other marks Colle Manora as an early site of practical formation.

Honors

Mimosa, at Colle Manora in Quargnento, is one of the first Sauvignon expressions in Piedmont, noted for its elegant, mineral style. Within Lanati’s body of work, that makes it an early marker of intent: a wine that shows what the region could say in a new register while staying measured and precise.