There is a particular kind of confidence that comes not from having nothing to lose, but from knowing exactly what you are protecting. At the Barbatelle tasting — a gathering of young female wine producers from across Italy, representing over fifteen estates from Piedmont to Etna, from Marche to Apulia — that confidence filled every glass poured and every conversation held beside the bottles.

Barbatelle is, by official count, barely two years old as a formal association. But as Marianna Velenosi of Velenosi Winery in Ascoli Piceno explains, the energy behind it long preceded any paperwork. “Before that, there was this movement of young female winemakers who wanted to create a community to share training, to share ideas, to share contacts,” she says. Today the association counts more than 100 producers from every corner of Italy. The name itself is a quiet act of poetry: barbatella is Italian for a young vine cutting — a plant not yet established, but full of potential, already rooted, already reaching.

To be a young vine is not to be fragile. It is to be in the most critical, most formative stage of becoming.

What Barbatelle Is — and Why It Matters

Italy’s wine landscape is ancient, fiercely regional, and historically masculine at the level of public visibility. Women have always been present — in the vineyards, in the cellars, in the accounts and the harvests and the daily decisions that make a domaine function. But for most of the twentieth century, they were, as Velenosi puts it plainly, “on the back.”

“My mom founded the winery together with my father. She was the first generation, back in the eighties. And in the eighties there were not so many women running wineries on the front side. They were there, but they were on the back.”
— Marianna Velenosi, Velenosi Vini

Barbatelle’s founding premise is simple: visibility is not vanity, it is infrastructure. When producers can see each other — can share a table, a tasting list, a problem, a solution — they build something more durable than individual brand recognition. They build a network with memory. The under-40 age limit is deliberate; the association is not interested in legacy so much as in the specific pressures, freedoms, and responsibilities of being new to the helm in a rapidly changing industry.

At the tasting, the range of wines on offer illustrated the geographic and stylistic breadth this generation commands. From Piedmont: Il Falchetto’s Alta Langa DOCG Blanc de Blanc Extra Brut, Barbera d’Asti Superiore, and Canelli Moscato; Azienda Agricola de Simone’s Langhe Nebbiolo, Barolo 2022, and Barbera d’Alba; Gaudio Bricco Mondalino’s Monferrato Casalese Cortese, Grignolino, and Barbera del Monferrato Superiore; Silvano Bolmida’s three expressions of Barolo from Bussia and Monforte; Franco Giacinto’s Terre Alfieri Arneis, Barbera d’Asti Superiore, and Nebbiolo Superiore; Accornero’s Grignolino, Barbera del Monferrato, and fragrant Malvasia di Casorzo; Garesio with Nizza DOCG and two Barolo from Serralunga; Castello di Uviglie pouring Metodo Classico, Monferrato Rosso, and the rare Albarossa. From further afield: Tenute Tozzi with Umbrian Grechetto alongside Etna’s Nerello Mascalese and Carricante; Migliosi with Assisi Grechetto; Varvaglione with Primitivo di Manduria and Susumaniello from Apulia; Poggio Stenti with Montecucco Sangiovese from Tuscany; LERM pouring the rare Erbaluce-based Caluso DOCG and Canavese Nebbiolo. And from Marche: Le Tempo — Letizia Cossignani’s all-Metodo-Classico estate — alongside Velenosi Vini, with Pecorino Verso, Verdicchio, Rosso Piceno Superiore, and the Montepulciano-led Ninfa.

The list reads like a tour of Italy’s indigenous varieties, not its international ambitions.

Identity as Strategy

The consistent thread running through every conversation at the tasting was not technique or even terroir in the abstract sense — it was identity. Specifically, the conviction that in a globalising, warming, shifting market, the strongest possible commercial and cultural position is one that cannot be replicated.

Letizia Cossignani, who co-founded Le Tempo with her brother Edoardo in the Marche region, frames this with near-philosophical precision.

“When you do something just for the market, tomorrow you can disappear because no one cares. When you’re doing something that belongs to your identity — there is no possibility that you can die tomorrow.”
— Letizia Cossignani, Le Tempo

Her winery is a case in point. Le Tempo produces exclusively Metodo Classico sparkling wine — a rarity in Marche, a region far better known for still whites. The lineup at the tasting included a 100% Sangiovese Rosé Brut assembled from a minimum of six harvests, a 100% Pecorino Extra Brut, and a 100% Chardonnay Blanc de Blancs Pas Dosé with 36 months on lees. None of these wines exist because a market research report demanded them. They exist because Cossignani saw an opportunity that required a long view and a strong nerve.

“Pecorino Sparkling Wine Metodo Classico — probably 25 years ago, it had no sense. Now, 100% sense,” she says. The identity you build is precisely the response to market change. “No one can question your huge identity, because it’s a strong identity, it’s your identity, it’s your work, it’s your job.”

Beatrice Gaudio of Gaudio Bricco Mondalino in Monferrato Casalese — a family tracing winemaking back to the 1700s, though the estate itself began bottling only in 1998 — articulates the same principle through the language of place. “What we want in our wines is to be the most representative of the place possible,” she says. “We feel like ambassadors of the place.”

For Gaudio, this manifests in a practice of radical parcel-by-parcel vinification. Since completing her oenology studies in 2015 and entering the family cellar, she has been vinifying every single plot separately — even very small ones — in order to read what each terroir, each vine age, each vintage is saying before deciding whether to blend or bottle solo. Of the estate’s 15 labels, only two are multi-vineyard blends.

Her Grignolino del Monferrato Casalese 2023 is exemplary of this approach. Grignolino is the most indigenous grape of the area — pale in colour despite two weeks of skin and seed maceration, its tannin structure derived not from skins but from seeds, which in Piedmontese dialect are called grignole, giving the grape its name. “Small red berries, this spiciness, this licorice and herbal touch,” Gaudio describes. “Without any barrel aging, it maintains the real character of the grape.” After two years of bottle aging, those seed tannins become silky and smooth. The wait is part of the identity. The decision to build a range around such a variety is itself a form of argument.

The Bridge Generation and the Weight of Climate

If there is one concept that surfaced repeatedly across the tasting — in different voices, in different registers, but with striking consistency — it is the idea of being a bridge. Not a revolutionary generation, not purely a custodial one, but something more demanding than either: the generation tasked with carrying something irreplaceable across a period of profound disruption.

“I think we are the generation that will probably suffer more from climate change, but at the same time the market is changing. Everything is changing really fast. So we need to be smarter than the climate change and smarter than the previous generation and try to be a little bit more on top of the transition. My goal is to be the bridge to the next one.”
— Letizia Cossignani, Le Tempo

What this means in practice is not wholesale reinvention. It is selective, intelligent evolution — knowing which elements of tradition are structural and which are merely habitual. “Changing the tradition is not cutting with the tradition,” Cossignani says with characteristic directness. “It’s surviving.”

Federica Bolmida of Silvano Bolmida in Monforte d’Alba — who took full charge of all vinification from the 2022 harvest onward — sees climate change as having already altered the raw material of Barolo, and not entirely for the worse. “Climate change in the last ten years has probably given us the opportunity to work with different raw materials in comparison to the past,” she observes. “Barolos now are more ready to drink — faster in drinkability, in a shorter time. But always longer in longevity.”

The shift she describes — from wines that needed a decade to become approachable, to wines that reward earlier drinking without sacrificing aging potential — coincides with, and perhaps enables, a shift in who drinks Barolo and when. Younger consumers, with less cellar space and less patience for deferred gratification, are not an obstacle to Barolo’s future. They may be its next audience.

Bolmida is direct about what she brings to the cellar. “If you want to produce a very clean wine and very representative of the area where it comes from, it’s important to keep that identity from the beginning to the end of the winemaking, to control that expression and not lose that expression.” For her, a clean physical environment and an uncompromised philosophy are inseparable — an approach she describes as “very focused, precise.” Her Barolo Le Coste di Monforte 2021 and Bussia Vigna dei Fantini 2021 bear this out: structured but accessible, regional but unintimidating.

Women, Wine, and the Front Side

The question of gender came up at virtually every table — not as complaint, but as sober contextualisation. The answers were consistently clear-eyed in their refusal of victimhood and their acknowledgement of structural change that is real, recent, and still unfinished.

Velenosi sees the shift less as women entering new territory and more as visibility finally catching up with reality. “I don’t think there is a difference in winemaking itself,” she says, “but I find it a difference when it comes to the storytelling. That’s where I find it really different.” This observation deserves weight. In an industry where the narrative around a wine often determines its commercial fate, storytelling is not supplementary to winemaking. It is a form of winemaking.

Bolmida reflects on how the industry has changed structurally. When she entered winemaking school in Alba, there were only two women in her class. Now, she notes, women are visible across all levels. “If you come from a family winery, that gives you the possibility to start to work inside that big important world, and you can have the possibility to keep or take a part of the job and do a personalisation on that job.”

For Bolmida, that personalisation was a clear division: she took winemaking, her brother took the vineyards. “What is important is to have your own responsibility in what you do every day.”

“It’s your passion, it’s your hobby, it’s your job. I love the contact with the people, I love to explain the wine, to taste the wine with people. It’s in your blood.”
— Beatrice Gaudio, Gaudio Bricco Mondalino

All four women interviewed rejected any suggestion that gender made them less capable of handling the physical or commercial demands of the industry. Where they identified difference — in communication style, in attention to detail, in the particular pleasure of relational selling — they spoke of it not as a handicap but as a characteristic that had become, in the current moment, rather useful.

Sparkling Wine as Social Product

One of the most structurally interesting arguments at the tasting came from Cossignani: the claim that sparkling wine occupies a uniquely resilient social position in a category facing demographic and cultural headwinds.

“I think it’s the most social product. People can think about wine, about beers, about non-alcoholic, but when we are talking about bubbles, they always say yes. Because it’s like — cheers, it’s celebration. There are so many meanings behind the cork of a bottle of sparkling.”
— Letizia Cossignani, Le Tempo

In the context of well-documented decline in overall wine consumption — particularly among younger cohorts in key markets — this is a strategic observation as much as a commercial one. The wine industry’s challenge is not just climate or economics; it is relevance. Sparkling wine, with its deep cultural encoding as a marker of celebration and shared pleasure, is structurally better positioned than most still categories to survive a shift toward more deliberate, occasion-driven drinking.

But Cossignani adds a responsibility to that resilience. The next generation must understand what the bubbles represent: not just effervescence and alcohol, but a human chain. “It’s bringing the experience of someone else in your glass — try to imagine how many hands have touched that bottle. We need to return to give value to the wine industry in terms of people that are behind the bottle, that try to do their best to survive and to give a survivance to their terroir, their landscape, their environment.” This is not nostalgia. It is an argument for depth.

The Indigenous Imperative

Across the full tasting list, the commitment to indigenous varieties was remarkable in its consistency. This was not a showcase of international grapes grown in Italy to appeal to global palates. Among the genuinely rare — varieties that exist in serious commercial production almost nowhere outside their home territory — the table offered Grignolino, Erbaluce, Albarossa, Malvasia di Casorzo, Carricante, Albana, and Susumaniello. Even the Chardonnay and Pinot Nero present appeared in the specific context of Alta Langa and Piemonte DOC Metodo Classico — traditions rooted in place, not references to Burgundy.

Gaudio’s father’s 1998 decision to plant Cortese rather than international varieties in Monferrato Casalese was, she explains, an act of conviction against the commercial current of the time. “He didn’t go for international grapes but he decided to go on the only indigenous that we have.” More than twenty-five years later, that decision reads as prescient. The taste-making segment of the global wine market has moved decisively toward specificity — toward wines that taste of somewhere, rather than wines that taste of a category.

The 2023 Barbera del Monferrato Superiore DOCG from Gaudio — 93% Barbera, 7% Freisa, aged in a mix of tonneau and barrique — demonstrated precisely what indigenous variety loyalty can yield: structure from Barbera’s characteristic tartaric acidity (which, unlike malic acid, does not degrade during ripening, making Barbera exceptionally well-suited to warm vintages), complexity from the old-vine Freisa component, and a personality entirely its own.

What It Means to Save Something

Letizia Cossignani ends one of her reflections with a sentence that seems, on first hearing, almost too large.

“It’s not only winemaking. It’s saving something.”
— Letizia Cossignani, Le Tempo

In the context of everything else said across the tasting — about climate disruption, market transformation, the transmission of tradition, the weight of responsibility toward both the generation before and the one to come — the sentence stops being grandiose and starts being precise.

What is being saved is not just a winery or a variety or a regional style, though all of those are at stake. What is being saved is a form of cultural intelligence: the accumulated knowledge of how to coax specific flavours from specific soils in specific climates, and transform them into something that tastes of a place, a time, and the hands that made it. That knowledge lives in people. When the people who carry it cannot pass it forward — through climate stress, economic pressure, generational discontinuity, or simple attrition — it disappears. And unlike a recipe or a technique, it cannot be recovered from a book.

Barbatelle is, among other things, infrastructure for transmission. A network through which knowledge, experience, stories, and community move laterally as well as vertically — not just from parent to child within a single estate, but across regions, appellations, and the full breadth of what Italian wine culture means and has meant.

We are not heroes, Cossignani says. “We are just people that have sacrificed everything for our results, and we want to maintain these results.”

The young vines are already growing.