Lasorte Cuadra in Valle d’Itria releases Silos 2020 to European and U.S. markets
16 November – One stainless steel vat or silos produced from a single parcel of indigenous varieties including Verdeca and Bianco d’Alessano, and a deliberately tight, yet international, network of passionate hand-sellers make Silos \ Valle d’Itria IGT Bianco from Lasorte Cuadra an oddity to classify—both in commercial and enological terms. But with the wine’s official release in recent weeks during the launch of Daniele Cernilli’s 2022 Essential Guide to Italian Wine, which has taken Lasorte Cuadra’s 93-point maiden vintage on tour to Warsaw, Milan and Zurich thus far, a consensus is already emerging about this “surprising” newcomer to the artisanal Italian wine category.
More about the wine—> lasortecuadra.com/techsheet
Motivated by the desire to eliminate the notable disconnect between producer and consumer, thereby making clear provenance a central feature of the brand experience, co-founders and married couple Roberto Lasorte and Stephanie Cuadra point to DTC sales as the primary outlet for their tiny production with full e-commerce capabilities set to go live at lasortecuadra.com for European customers in time for the holidays. Meanwhile, Lasorte Cuadra’s sister company Terrestoria Wine Imports provides a direct route to the U.S. market: via Utah’s DABC online special order system, and soon in California through independent wine retailers who subscribe to the LibDib digital wholesale platform.
Simplified distribution translates to attractive pricing too. Listed at $23.99/bottle in Utah, the intention is obvious: Silos wants to draw attention to the Valle d’Itria while over-delivering in the process. And through that relationship between price and quality, Lasorte Cuadra is informing wine buyers about the largely ignored potential of viticulture on this limestone plateau in central Puglia where generations of small growers have traditionally catered to bulk markets alone.
“Silos is in many ways the simple wine my parents used to make for our everyday consumption at meal times, a wine that has always existed in the Valle d’Itria,” explains Roberto Lasorte. “But in order to honor that history and, more urgently, to preserve local vines which are dying off before our eyes, we have no choice but to challenge the way things were done before through experimentation—even if that means possible setbacks along the way.”
As the first in what is envisaged as a progressively complex range of wines to come through a strategic partnership between Lasorte Cuadra and the UPAL wine co-operative of Cisternino, Silos is a proud legacy and a disruptive forerunner in equal parts
