Wine Arcana

Grape

Recantina

Also known as Recantina Forner

Recantina is a dark-skinned grape of the Asolo and Montello hills in Veneto. Its revival adds a local red to a landscape internationally associated with Glera and Prosecco, and with established plantings of Merlot and Cabernet. The wines combine dark colour, fruit and spice with a noticeable tannic grip, although cellar choices can make them quite approachable young.

Recovering a particular vine

The historical name needs care. Veneto Agricoltura's recovery work distinguished three vines called Recantina: peccolo rosso, peccolo scuro, and Forner, named after the holding where it was preserved. The Forner material is the subject of the modern revival discussed here. References to Recantina in old documents therefore cannot all be assigned automatically to the same vine.1. Veneto Agricoltura, Vecchi vitigni del Veneto, “Recantina Forner,” distinguishing three recovered varieties under the historical name.

That distinction illustrates what saving an old grape involves: finding surviving plants, checking their identity, propagating them, and testing the wines. Keeping a familiar name in circulation is only part of the work.

Vineyard and wine

The regional technical profile describes medium vigour, fairly loose bunches, thick dark skins and ripening in the middle-to-later part of the season. It favours long pruning and records useful sugar, acid and pigment accumulation. Those observations come from recovered material under local conditions, rather than establishing performance in every climate.

Colour and tannin make extraction and maturation important stylistic decisions. A deeply coloured Recantina need not spend years in new oak: at Serafini e Vidotto, the published method uses October harvesting and at least six months in steel. Its description emphasizes fruit, pepper and slightly rustic tannins. This offers a concrete example of a wine intended to retain youthful fruit while allowing some settling before release.

A contemporary local revival

The Asolo Montello consortium includes Recantina among the local varieties of Montello Asolo DOC. Its present significance is concentrated in these hills, where producers have given a scarce grape a commercial reason to survive. Pat del Colmel explicitly uses the Forner name on its Recantina bottlings; Serafini e Vidotto offers another current varietal expression.

Together, these wines provide a useful comparison with Veneto's Raboso Piave: two local red-grape traditions whose identities are clearer when named individually than when absorbed into a generic account of northeastern Italian reds.

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