On a bright, warm, fall morning, Graziano Prà tears around the volcanic hillside vineyards of Soave Classico on an all-terrain quad. He roars up steep, half-paved rises, then ducks low as he veers under the head-height pergolas holding up vines dangling golden grapes.
Every so often he stops, picks some fruit, tastes and moves on to the next hillside—ending at Monte Grande, his family’s old vineyard, planted on basaltic soils. There, the fruit-bearing canes have already been cut—a traditional, but now rare process that causes the grape bunches to slightly dehydrate and concentrate their flavors over the course of weeks.
“The grapes are ready,” Prà announces at the end of the morning. “It’s time to start harvesting. We’ll start at the bottom of the hills and climb up.”
The whole process will take a month, completing Prà’s 41st harvest. Over those four decades, he has grown from a first-generation winemaking novice to an influential producer in the world of Northern Italian white wine. In Soave Classico, he has been a key figure in a relatively small club of producers who have fought to distinguish themselves from the sea of generic Soave (once America’s most imported Italian white) produced mainly on the fertile flatlands.
“Soave never developed a prestigious reputation,” he laments on the back terrace of his home and winery in his native Veneto town of Monteforte d’Alpone. As he looks out at serene vineyards that rise past willow and plane trees to the top of a ridge, he continues, “But there is terroir. Over time, I saw that it gave me something real—and wines that could age.”
At 66, he has reached full stride, producing 26 wines that scored 90 points or higher in Wine Spectator blind tastings in the past 15 years. They include 15 whites—topped by his 2020 Soave Classico Monte Grande single-vineyard bottling (93 points, $40)—along with elegant red Valpolicella and Amarone wines that he launched 17 years ago from vineyards at a relatively high altitude of 1,500 feet in the neighboring Valpolicella appellation.
Tall, lanky and softspoken, Prà eats a home-cooked lunch most days with his young staff of thirtysomethings, including winery enologist Luca Guiotto, assistant enologist Marco Fusa and Prà’s right-hand manager Diego Corradi.
Prà starts most mornings early in the winery, where he has been known to literally sniff around the place to determine if his fermentations and aging wines are well.
“The nose for me is the most important part of this job,” he says. “If the nose is clean, the wine is clean. If the nose is good, the wine is good. The nose doesn’t fool you.”
It seems that, over his career, Prà has been led by a reliable nose for quality.
He hails from a sprawling Soave grapegrowing family that sold grapes to cooperatives and large producers. As a young man, Prà studied enology and went to work for others. Then, in 1983, he and his brother, Sergio, 15 years his senior, started Prà in a rented old winery that had fallen into disuse.
In the beginning, they purchased grapes and cultivated Monte Grande’s four acres of Garganega and Trebbiano di Soave, the traditional Soave Classico blend. In 1988, they launched a single-vineyard Monte Grande bottling, their flagship.
Two years later, the brothers built the first iteration of their winery, attached to the family farmhouse. For the first time, Prà was able to control fermentation temperatures, use a gentle modern press, and age his wines in large oak casks.
“I felt like I was touching the sky,” he says. “For the first time, I could make the wines I had in my head.”
With the new winery, Prà introduced a second flagship: Colle Sant’Antonio Soave Classico, a single-variety Garganega fermented in and aged on its lees in oak casks for about two years. (The 2016 vintage, priced $38, scored 92 points.)
In the 2000s, he continued to grow and refine the project while buying out his brother, who was ready for retirement. Prà, who has always farmed organically and achieved certification five years ago, now works close to 130 acres and produces about 30,000 cases annually in an expanded winery.
About 20 of those vineyard acres climb and sprawl over a limestone-rich hill called Monte Bisson, covered with woods, fields and medieval ruins, including a lookout tower. The chalky, calcareous soils here add a piercing freshness to his Soave Classico blends that complements the power from the volcanic vineyards.
For Prà, the area is also a kind of personal retreat. “I fell in love with it—it hit me. It fascinates me,” he says. “Every day I go at least once.”
In his whites, Prà’s goal is to translate and preserve the flavors of his fruit at harvest for as long as possible. To that end, in 2010—unhappy with uneven aging and cork taint in some bottles—he began a transition to screwcap closures, completed with the 2022 vintage.
Prà’s sense of purity is even more striking in his reds—a Valpolicella, a Valpolicella Ripasso, a Ripasso Superiore and an Amarone—all bone dry, bright and relatively lithe from an area whose wines were once defined by heft and residual sweetness.
“My reds don’t please everyone,” he says and laughs. “I was trained as a white winemaker. And they are the reds of a white winemaker.”
