Italy boasts a wealth of winegrowing families who have never lost sight of the crucial importance of their local terroir and who continue to manage their viticultural heritage with the utmost responsibility and in full respect for their surrounding environment, striving to harness all of their efforts into producing the finest, healthiest grapes possible. The Counts of Collalto family is proud of its centuries-old history as landowning nobility: for over a thousand years it has tenaciously preserved its agricultural patrimony, through countless political seasons and wars, and ever-changing social systems and fashions. For this reason, the Azienda Agricola Conte Collalto has always been one of the oldest and most influential winemaking estates in the province of Treviso and the Collalto family one of the leading figures in the history of the Marca Trevigiana, its roots going back as far as 958 AD. In that year, Berengarius II, King of Italy, leased to Count Rambaldo I, illustrious ancestor of the Collalto family, the Contea (County) of Lovadina, with all of its fields, pasturelands, woods, and vineyards.
Isabella Collalto has inherited that lengthy family tradition, and today she directs her 150 hectares of vineyards, the true pride of the estate, as if it were in fact a vine-filled garden, giving painstaking attention to the needs of each separate grape variety and, at the same time, to their surrounding ecosystem. Characteristics inherent in this corner of earth, such as yearly variations in local weather, differences in soils from parcel to parcel, and the number and variety of grapes planted on the estate, give to Collalto’s wines those distinctive characteristics of which the winery is justly proud.
The coat of arms of the Collalto family constitutes the winery’s trademark, a shield quartered with the colours black and white; it occupies pride of place on the solemn neo-classical-style gateway that gives access, from the south, to the village of Castello San Salvatore. The Collalto motto, occurring often in the family’s archives, is “Post tenebras, lux,” or After the shadows, light.
