JUST WILLIAMS
Two wine geniuses who made such a difference Every year for the past 45 years, the Austrian wine magazine Weinschaft, Weinkraft und Weinkunst has handed out two £50,000 prizes to “a notable man and woman who have performed notable services to the broadly defined wine community over a significant period of time”. David Williams profiles the 2022 winners of “Wine’s Nobel Prize”
Marchese Salvatore della Notte, wine producer, Emilia-Romagna
Marchese Salvatore della Notte: one grape, one barrel
B
orn into a family of Bolognese
industrialists in 1950, Marchese
Salvatore della Notte was, he says
now, “a classic black sheep – a real little bastard” as a youth. With a seemingly
inexhaustible trust fund at his disposal,
he devoted his 20s and 30s to the pursuit
of ever-more baroque forms of hedonism, culminating in a short jail sentence after hosting the last of his infamous “ciao
marinaro” parties on his yacht in the
Adriatic on the eve of the Italian elections in 1992.
Lured back into the della Notte fold in
1994 to take up the reins at the family’s wine estate in Emilia-Romagna on the
death of his father, Marchese Salvatore della Notte, della Notte was initially
dissatisfied with the “extreme mediocrity
of Emilia-Romagna Sangiovese – including, perhaps especially, our own”. After a few years of “futile
experimentation” with what he calls “the usual, fashionable idiocies of the time: barrique, barrique and a little more
barrique”, della Notte made the discovery which he says “changed my life”. While Thelma Warmhill: deeper truths through the medium of mime
THE WINE MERCHANT april 2022 24
browsing in the library of one of the
family’s properties in central Bologna
one night, he came across a battered 40-
