Adriano Kaufmann

Selection before the cellar

Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon are selected in the vineyard before Adriano Kaufmann, winemaker at Adriano Kaufmann in Tresa, brings the fruit into the cellar at Beride. His station is in Malcantone, west of Lugano, where hillside vineyards sit between Monte Lema and the Tresa river, and where the house has stayed close to a Bordeaux-minded reading of Ticino fruit since 1980. Kaufmann is known here not as a travelling consultant but as the maker whose name is on the cellar, the builder and operator of a small winery shaped around Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and the discipline of selection.

The lineage that can be stated plainly is geographical and methodological. Kaufmann belongs to the German-Swiss movement into Ticino in the early 1980s, a group that looked at the canton’s south-facing hills and asked more of its red varieties than light local styles had usually required. At Beride, that meant structure, patience, and a willingness to let maturity become part of the wine’s design.

A Merlot-Cabernet held to one blend

Pio della Rocca carries the estate’s argument in one wine. The blend is given as 85% Merlot and 15% Cabernet Sauvignon, a proportion that places Merlot at the centre while giving Cabernet the work of frame, tannin, and aromatic lift. Kaufmann does not present it as a single-vineyard bottling. He treats it as a selection from the vineyard, then subjects that selection to tasting in the barrique cellar before the wine earns its place under the label.

The technique is old-fashioned in the useful sense. Fermentation in foudre gives the fruit a larger wooden vessel before the wine moves into barrique for ageing, where density and structure can knit without losing the line of the fruit. This is not a cellar built around breadth of range. It is built around a narrow set of decisions repeated until they become house language: Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, vineyard selection, foudre, barrique, and the patience required for a red that is meant to age rather than charm quickly.

The quiet of Beride

The place works at a different volume from the visitor-facing wineries around better-known Swiss wine roads. In Beride, within the Tresa municipality, the cellar belongs to the hills rather than to a spectacle of hospitality. The room is quiet, traditional, and scaled to limited quantities; the feeling is less tasting-room theatre than working cellar, with the barrique program close to the centre of the craft.

Outside, Malcantone gives the wine its practical tension: slopes, exposure, and the mixed Swiss-Italian weather of Ticino. Inside, the decisions narrow. Fruit becomes lots, lots become a blend, and the blend waits until its structure has settled into the bottle. If the estate has a next move to announce, it has not made that public; for now the work remains fixed on the same named red, Pio della Rocca.