Summary
Nicola Biasi — Friuli-born, consulting across the Triveneto, founder of Resistenti Nicola Biasi which has grown to eight estates — has made himself the most persistent and persuasive voice in Italy’s argument over resistant grape varieties. The PIWI, from the German Pilzwiderstandsfähige Rebsorten, fungus-resistant grape varieties, were bred to hold off disease and cut chemical treatments in the vineyard. That case has been made and largely accepted: Albafiorita’s research put figures to it, 38% fewer CO2 emissions, water use down by as much as 70%. Biasi’s point is that the industry has been hiding behind those numbers for long enough. The question that actually matters is whether the wines are good, and whether they mean something — whether they carry a sense of place the way a serious traditional wine does.
He is also insistent, and this is the part of his argument that tends to get lost, that these varieties are not a category. Souvignier Gris, Johanniter, Bronner, Soreli, Solaris, Cabernet Eidos, Cabernet Cortis — they are as different from each other as Sangiovese is from Teroldego, and treating them as a bloc defined by what they resist misses everything interesting about them. They are also, it should be said, interspecific crosses, many carrying non-vinifera genetic material alongside their vinifera ancestry — which is precisely why regulators have been slow and why parts of the market remain wary. The piece gestures at the appellation question without quite resolving it, which is fair enough because nobody has: northern Italy has seen some experimental openings, most DOC and DOCG systems have not moved. Anyone wanting to judge the wines directly can do so in Milan on 18 May, at Enoluogo, viale Andrea Doria 24, Born to Resist, from 14:30.
Our take
Biasi is right that the environmental argument has done its job and the industry needs to move past it. Where the piece struggles is in taking his word for everything else. The regulatory picture it sketches — Italy sitting on the appellation question — is real but incomplete. Some regions have already opened experimental doors. Others are nowhere near it. The difference matters and the article flattens it. The sustainability story also has a footnote the piece skips: resistant varieties are not fully treatment-free. Under hard conditions, growers spray. Biasi knows this; his supporters know this; the article doesn’t mention it. And then there is the market, which the piece discusses entirely in the abstract — quality, identity, recognition — without once asking whether any of this is selling, or how consumers feel about grape names they have never encountered, or whether the pricing makes sense against conventional alternatives. Not hostile questions. Just the obvious ones.
About the author
No name on this piece, which is worth pausing on. The site lists the author as "Redazione" — the desk, collectively, nobody in particular. Reading it, that tracks: it follows Biasi’s positions so closely it could almost be a transcript of his talking points, smoothed into paragraphs. That may simply be how this outlet covers the people it covers. Trade publications often work this way. But a named writer would at least give you somewhere to go with a question. As it stands, there is nowhere to go.
About the publisher
Agricultura.it has been around since 2001, registered with the Tribunal of Siena, with Lorenzo Benocci as editor. It covers the Italian rural and agri-food world in a fairly wide arc — markets, policy, crops, wine — and it does so in the manner of a trade publication rather than a newspaper: useful, informed, not especially inclined to cause trouble. For an industry reader wanting to know what practitioners are thinking and saying, it does the job. For a reader wanting those practitioners scrutinised, it is a different story.