Farina

Since 2010 at the cellar line

Measurement comes before flourish in the cellar. Andrea Zerman, winemaker at Farina in San Pietro In Cariano, brings that discipline to Valpolicella Classica. He trained at Conegliano, then worked first as a lab technician for companies that produced detergents, where consistency is not an idea but a daily requirement. Before Farina, he carried that habit into a wine technician role at a Lake Garda winery. Since 2010, he has held the wine technician and winemaker post here, working where analysis, tasting, and cellar decision meet.

Farina is a family-run estate with more than 100 years behind it, set in a Renaissance courtyard at the foothills of Valpolicella, with vineyards around the historic buildings and Verona close by. The house works in the grammar of the zone: Corvina, Rondinella, and Molinara for Valpolicella Classica, with Garganega, Trebbiano di Soave, and Turbiana also in the wider program. Zerman’s path suits a cellar that asks for control without sanding away character. The method depends on the hand, but also on the patience to let numbers tell part of the truth.

Concrete tulips and amphorae underground

The cellar program holds old Valpolicella language beside newer vessels. Amarone della Valpolicella DOCG Classico and Valpolicella Ripasso DOC Classico Superiore sit at the center of the red work, with the drying and second-fermentation traditions of the area treated as working methods rather than display. Farina also makes Soave Classico DOC, Bianco di Custoza DOC, rosé, dessert wines, and IGT bottlings including Appassilento, Nodo d’Amore, Godò, and Corte Conti Cavalli.

Underground, concrete tulips and ceramic amphorae share the cellar with traditional barrels. Those forms matter because they change the pace and feel of aging: concrete keeps a steady, quiet line; amphorae give the wine another kind of contact; wood remains part of the Valpolicella conversation. The estate works with sustainable practices and has built a transparency project around suppliers, importers, and collaborators. It also exports about 70% of its production, a figure that places this Pedemonte cellar well beyond its courtyard without loosening its tie to Valpolicella Classica DOC.

The courtyard and the glass cube

The place does not read as a museum. The courtyard gives Farina its older frame, with the proportion and quiet of a historic estate, while the wine boutique and glass-walled Cube bring a sharper contemporary line to tastings and private gatherings. In the tasting room, the conversation can move from Amarone to Soave without leaving the same house vocabulary. Downstairs, the cellar carries the cooler register: concrete, amphora, barrel, and the slow work of wines made for different tempos.

That contrast is the texture of Farina now. The estate keeps the family-run cadence of Valpolicella, but Zerman’s bench is technical, exacting, and current. The next measure of the place remains in the cellar itself, in how the same hands read Corvina, Rondinella, Molinara, and the vessels beneath the Farina courtyard.