Cinque Terre Wine & the Terraces
The winemakers who keep Vernazza's terraces — and the walls that slow the floods — alive, and how to visit them.
Vernazza sits at the mouth of a ravine, held back by terraces that climb the slopes on dry-stone walls — the muretti — built and rebuilt by hand for a thousand years. Those walls do more than grow grapes: they slow the rain off the hillside. When terraces are abandoned and the walls fail, the water runs straight down. On 25 October 2011, after terraces above the village had gone untended for years, a few hours of rain filled the Vernazzola stream and buried Via Roma under metres of mud. The winemakers who still work these slopes are, in effect, the guardians of the land.
The vineyards have shrunk from about 1,400 hectares a century ago to roughly 100 today, and Sciacchetrà — the rare sweet passito the Cinque Terre is known for — is made only in small amounts from grapes dried for weeks after the harvest. Visiting a cantina, walking the terraces, and buying a bottle straight from the grower is the most concrete way to keep those hands, and those walls, at work.
Most of these are tiny family operations, so book ahead — and know that September is harvest, when the monorails run and everyone is on the vines.