Modern art has created many trends that still shape culture today. One such trend was born of artist dissatisfaction with the rigid forms of their mediums. Attempts to change this were modest at first, even minuscule, and to the contemporaries of early modernity these attempts might have seemed conventional and by the numbers; uninspired; boring. The trend in question saw artists very strictly following the rules of their forms and mastering them, just to later break the rules in all the right ways. These trailblazers of modernity would go on to influence those that would birth post-modernity, and so it goes.
Avezza isn’t looking to break rules in wine-making, but they are interested in seeing where rules can bend. Based in Piedmont, Italy, Avezza is and has always been the outlier in a region as famous for its wine as it is for the traditions that make and bottle them. Purchased in 1956 by Paolos Avezza and ran almost entirely by him as a tiny operation for the better part of seven decades, Paolo was always interested in innovation, in how modernity can enhance this and that element of wine-making, an attitude and ethic that is rare in Piedmont.
Avezza’s breathtaking wines still honour the region – every bottle begins in Piedmont’s soil after all – but they refuse to be shackled by tradition. Their wines are the flavour of slow and unstoppable change that is ripened in grape and poured into glass. They intend to trailblaze and in doing so, they bottle the tension that lies in forward-thinking and forward-moving. Avezza is modern vintage.
