At A Glance
- **Type:** Cooperative winery
- **Village:** Cortaccia sul Lago di Caldaro (Kurtatsch an der Weinstrasse)
- **Zone:** Alto Adige DOC, Trentino-Alto Adige, northeastern Italy
- **Members:** 190 families
- **Hectares:** 190
- **President:** Andreas Kofler
- **Key Grapes:** Pinot Noir, Schiava, plus white varieties across high-altitude sites
- **Harvest:** Hand-picked
The Producer
Cantina Kurtatsch is a cooperative winery in the village of Cortaccia, a small Alto Adige commune whose German name, Kurtatsch an der Weinstrasse, places it firmly on the Wine Road that runs through the Adige valley in northeastern Italy. One hundred and ninety member families farm 190 hectares across the village and its surrounding slopes, pooling grapes into a single cellar. Every vineyard is worked by hand.
Andreas Kofler runs the cooperative as president, a position he took at age 32, making him the youngest person to lead a cooperative winery in Alto Adige's history.
The cooperative produces whites from high-elevation parcels and reds from warmer, lower-altitude sites. The division is not incidental: it links Cortaccia's geography to its bottles.
Place
Alto Adige occupies the northernmost tip of Italy, above the Adige river in a deep Alpine valley system. The region sits between the Dolomites to the east and the Ortler Alps to the west, and produces wine under the Alto Adige DOC label across a range of altitudes that, in practical terms, means a single cooperative can grow genuinely cool-climate whites and fuller, riper reds within a few kilometres of each other.
Cortaccia lies in the southern part of the zone, where the valley floor warms considerably in summer but hillside vineyards climb high enough to recover the freshness that northern Italian whites depend on. The altitude split is the defining geographical fact at Cantina Kurtatsch. High-elevation parcels stay cooler through the growing season, preserving acidity and mineral character in white varieties. Warmer, south-facing positions lower on the slope accumulate heat that allows red varieties to ripen fully and age in barrel without losing freshness.
Soil And Site
The soils across Cortaccia's vineyard area are not uniform. The village sits where glacial and alluvial deposits meet hillside rock, and the altitude bands that determine grape assignment also carry different mineral compositions from one slope to the next. The cooperative's site-matching philosophy, assigning white varieties to high, cooler parcels and reds to warmer, lower positions, is partly a thermal decision and partly a soil one: the high-altitude plots hold less heat, drain quickly, and tend to produce wines with a taut, mineral quality rather than generous fruit weight.
Story
Cantina Kurtatsch has operated as a cooperative for decades, its cooperative model reflecting the traditional organisation of Alto Adige viticulture. In this region, cooperative cellars are not a compromise: many of the zone's most serious wines come from growers who pool resources because the parcels are too small, too steep, or too scattered to support individual estate bottling at any commercial scale. The 190-family model at Kurtatsch is a continuation of that pattern.
What changed in recent years is leadership. When Andreas Kofler was elected president in his early thirties, it was the first time a cooperative president in the region had been that young. Othmar Doná was simultaneously entering the final years of a 30-year tenure in the cellar. The overlap, a young institutional leader alongside a winemaker whose career had tracked the cooperative's entire modern history, gave the house an unusual combination of continuity and pressure to articulate what it stood for.
The production philosophy has remained in place: altitude-matched site selection, hand harvesting, cold fermentation for whites, neutral-oak ageing for reds.
Vineyards And Cellar
All 190 hectares are hand-harvested, a logistical commitment at cooperative scale that keeps fruit intact through the picking window and avoids the oxidative bruising that mechanical harvesting can introduce, particularly important for white varieties that will spend five months on their lees.
White wines ferment in temperature-controlled stainless steel tanks on selected yeasts. The cold fermentation preserves aromatic clarity, pulling out the floral and citrus notes that high-altitude Alto Adige whites carry without the weight or softness that warmer fermentation would add. After fermentation, the wines stay on their fine lees for at least five months before bottling. Lees contact over that period adds a quiet texture and body that keeps the wines fresh without making them feel thin or purely mineral.
Red wines follow a different route. They ferment in stainless steel, then move into large, neutral oak casks in either Slavonian or French oak. The casks are large enough and old enough that they add no perceptible oak flavour. Their job is to soften the tannin gradually and allow the wine to develop in barrel without picking up the vanilla or toast character of new wood. The red comes out of the cellar with more complexity than tank-raised wine but without the oak signature that would mask the fruit or the freshness of the elevation.
Wines
The range at Cantina Kurtatsch follows the altitude pattern across the vineyards. White varieties planted on high-elevation parcels produce wines with low fermentation temperatures amplifying their natural freshness: expect citrus, white flower, and a mineral thread through the mid-palate. The lees contact over five months adds roundness while retaining the acidity.
Pinot Noir is the documented red, grown on warmer, south-facing sites where it ripens fully while retaining the lighter body and fresh acidity that distinguish Alto Adige Pinot Noir from versions grown farther south in Italy. The large-cask ageing softens the tannins without flattening the fruit: the wine carries red cherry, redcurrant, and red forest berry on the nose, with a body and tannins that are firm but approachable without extended bottle age.
Schiava also appears in the range, a red grape native to this part of northern Italy, typically light-bodied and drinkable young, used here in a style that fits the cooperative's commitment to freshness across both colours.
In The Glass
The whites open with citrus and white flower, the kind of aromatic clarity that cold fermentation in stainless steel preserves and five months on lees begins to deepen. In the mouth the acidity is clean and forward, the body light to medium. The mineral thread that runs through the mid-palate is the signature of high-altitude growing conditions: the vines are not under heat stress, the grapes ripen slowly, and the wine is taut and upright, finishing with more length than weight.
The Pinot Noir reads differently. The nose carries cherries, redcurrants, and the wilder red-berry note that the sources call red forest berries. It is fragrant without being heavy. On the palate the body is present but not large, and the tannins are juicy rather than grippy, softened by the large neutral casks without being smoothed to nothing. The finish is fresh, and the overall impression is of a red wine that feels closer to northern Burgundy than to any warm-climate Italian model.
A Bottle To Understand It
The Alto Adige Pinot Noir is the first bottle to open at Cantina Kurtatsch. It demonstrates the core altitude argument in red wine form: grapes grown on warm south-facing slopes in a deep Alpine valley, fermented without extraction and aged in large neutral wood, producing a red that is lighter and fresher than its Italian postcode might suggest. The nose delivers cherries and redcurrants with a forest-berry note, the body is light and firm without being heavy, and the tannins are close enough to resolved that the wine works well young. It does not need decanting or a long wait. Start here to understand what a warm-site red from this altitude and latitude actually gives in the glass.
Anecdote
When Andreas Kofler was elected president of Cantina Kurtatsch, he was 32 years old. That made him the youngest person to chair a cooperative winery anywhere in Alto Adige, a region where the cooperative system is old, embedded, and had until that point been led by people whose authority came with decades of accumulated membership standing. The wine trade noticed. A cooperative of 190 families, with vineyards covering every hectare of the village, had handed its presidency to someone who had not yet spent a career in the room. Kofler took the chair and stayed in it. Down in the cellar, Othmar Doná continued making the wines for the years that followed, as he had done for three decades. For a period, the cooperative ran with an unusually young face at the top and an unusually long-tenured voice in the cellar. What Kofler's election showed, quietly, was that a cooperative built on collective farming can also move on collective trust rather than collective seniority.
Final Word
Cantina Kurtatsch makes a compelling case that cooperative viticulture in Alto Adige is not a category compromise. One hundred and ninety families farming 190 hectares by hand, matched to altitude by thermal logic, producing whites with genuine mineral character and a Pinot Noir lighter and fresher than most Italian red wine drinkers expect: it is a producer worth knowing before reaching for a more famous name on the same shelf.