The southern, Italian-speaking half of the Adige valley, Trentino is a region of high-volume cooperatives and a few serious growers, sheltered between the Dolomites and Lake Garda. Its calling card is Teroldego, the deeply coloured native red of the gravel plain of the Campo Rotaliano, but it also makes crisp alpine whites and a great deal of sparkling base wine.
Cooler and higher than most of Italy, it turns out fresh, precise Pinot Grigio and Chardonnay and the fragrant, cherryish Marzemino once praised in Mozart's Don Giovanni. Trentino is where Italy tips over into the Alps — and where a handful of producers prove its native reds can be world-class.