Fradé

From vineyard crates to the cellar

Hand-picked bunches arrive in crates before Francesco Piaggi, winemaker at Fradé in Borgo Priolo, turns the work toward the cellar. Since 2018, he has held the project close at both ends, as co-founder and as the person responsible for shaping the wines that leave the estate. The name Fradé carries that structure in miniature. In the Oltrepò dialect it means brothers, and it also draws from Francesco and Federico Piaggi, the two brothers behind the house.

The winery belongs to the Boffenisio and Cattabrega estates in the Oltrepò Pavese, in the southern part of the province of Pavia. Francesco’s role is not presented as a separate cellar appointment grafted onto a brand. It sits inside the founding decision: organic red, white, and sparkling wines from certified vineyards, made as an agricultural project rather than a label assembled at a distance. He is also identified as a sommelier, and his remit runs from vineyard to bottle. That matters here because Fradé’s discipline begins before fermentation. The house language returns again and again to the vines, the soils, the season, and the decision to keep production deliberately limited so the plants are not pushed past their strength.

Organic rows in a natural amphitheatre

The method begins in certified organic farming. Fradé states that it uses only natural substances to defend and nurture the vines, and that grape production is limited with the aim of protecting plant balance. The vineyards stand in a valley among the hills of Borgo Priolo, where the slopes form a natural amphitheatre above the Coppa stream. Limestone-clay marl soils and a favorable microclimate are part of the estate’s own account of why Pinot Nero, Croatina, Riesling, Sauvignon, and Fagòt belong here.

At harvest, the hands stay close to the fruit. Grapes are picked by hand, moved in crates, then selected according to ripeness before they enter the winery. The portfolio is built across sparkling wines, white wines, red wines, and barricaded wines, so the cellar does not point in only one direction. Stainless steel appears in published information for the 2024 Trelati Pinot Nero dell’Oltrepò Pavese DOC BIO, a dry wine at 13.0% alcohol, while the house also keeps a category for oak-aged bottlings. Fradé does not publish a full technical account of fermentation protocols, barrel formats, or élevage for the range. Francesco’s cellar work follows the organic vineyard rather than disguising it.

The quiet of Boffenisio and Cattabrega

The place reads as a working hillside estate before it reads as hospitality. The vineyard and cellar setting sit inside a quiet valley, with the Boffenisio and Cattabrega properties giving the project its ground. Fradé’s public face is young and direct, but the atmosphere is not built around spectacle. The room for the work is the landscape itself: certified rows, cellar decisions, crates at harvest, bottles that keep the family name near the soil.

That quiet helps explain the house’s scale. This is a small, family-run organic winery, not a broad commercial platform, and the brand’s own identity stays close to the Piaggi brothers’ attachment to the estates through spring, autumn, and winter. The tasting room exists, but the more revealing texture is bench-side and vineyard-side: how the crop is carried, how ripeness is chosen, how the cellar leaves room for Oltrepò Pavese DOC to remain legible in the glass.

What remains in the glass

Fradé matters most as a current Oltrepò Pavese project with ownership, farming, and winemaking held in the same family structure. The range gives Francesco room to work across red, white, sparkling, and oak-aged expressions without loosening the organic thread. If the next chapter is not announced in public detail, the present one is concrete enough: Francesco Piaggi at the cellar, Federico Piaggi in the name, and the Coppa stream below Boffenisio and Cattabrega.