Bottles behind bars

Bra, Italy is where more than 100,000 bottles of wine crafted by 300 winemakers are kept under lock and key at Slow Food University’s Wine Bank project.

The aim is to maintain a historical memory of Italy’s best wine.

It is here that winemakers put 24 bottles of their best for a few of those bottles to become part of a living memory.  Slow Food offers a few of the other bottles up for sale following three to five years of cellar time. Other bottles are occasionally opened to evaluate how bottle aging is changing the wine over  time.

The Wine Bank project sprung from Carlo Petrini’s vision of the non-profit association, Slow Food in the 1990s. Following that creation came the university, which serves as a cultural center of food and wine plus a school for gastronomic science, agriculture, stock breeding and viticulture.