When Myrtha Zierock came to Nashville, she did not come as a winemaker. Her brother Emilio makes the wines at Foradori. Her brother Theo handles the business. Myrtha is the farmer — an environmental scientist by training, the one who returned from permaculture work in Quebec to build out the polyculture beyond the vineyards: vegetables, cheese, bread, the slow expansion of what a wine estate can be when it stops thinking of itself only as that. So when we spent the day visiting clients with her, what she brought into every restaurant and shop was not a story about wine. It was a story about land. Which is, finally, the right way around.
This is what makes Foradori worth writing about, and worth pouring. The estate sits on the Campo Rotaliano — a flat, gravelly plain at the bottom of the Dolomites, where the mountains rise so steeply on either side that the light spends half the day refracted off rock. Most of the surrounding viticulture went the way of the co-op, planting international varieties through the back end of the twentieth century because that was the market. Elisabetta Foradori did not. She took over in 1984, at twenty-one, after her father's death — at first, by her own account, more out of duty than vocation. The vocation arrived later, through the work itself, and what it arrived believing was that the indigenous Teroldego grape was worth saving. She propagated from the oldest vines on the property rather than buying clones from a nursery. She converted the entire estate to biodynamics in two years, beginning in 2002. And she did all of this, as she has put it, because she could not see herself doing otherwise.
There is a version of this story — the queen of Teroldego, the natural wine icon, the cult — that has been told often and well by people other than us. We have less to add to that version. What strikes us about Foradori, every time we open a bottle, is that the wines are built for the table. They are not feats. They do not require an essay. The Granato — old-vine Teroldego from those original massal-selected blocks, aged in large oak — is a wine of considerable seriousness, but its seriousness is the kind a roast finds interesting, not the kind that makes you put down your fork and consider it. The single-vineyard Teroldegos, Sgarzon and Morei, raised in clay tinajas, taste like the soils they come from — sandy and quiet, rocky and bright, in that order. The Fuoripista skin-contact Pinot Grigio is delicious in a way that has nothing to do with being orange and everything to do with being delicious. The Nosiola, a grape that had nearly disappeared from Trentino before Elisabetta brought it back through amphora work, is one of the most quietly affecting white wines made anywhere. And then there is the Lezer — Emilio's lighter, chillable Teroldego, made as a working answer to a hotter Trentino. None of these wines are trying to win an argument. They are trying to be drunk.
This is what we mean when we say Foradori is for gastronomic pleasure, not impression. The distinction matters more than it might seem. A great deal of celebrated wine — including a great deal of celebrated natural wine — is more interesting to think about than to drink with food. Foradori's work is the inverse. The thinking is real, the farming is rigorous, the philosophical commitments are unbroken. But the wines disappear into a meal, which is the highest compliment we can pay them.
The succession is real, and it is what made Myrtha's visit feel like more than a representative call. Emilio has been making the wines since 2012. Theo joined in 2015. Myrtha came back from Quebec to take over the farming. Elisabetta is still present — still walking the vineyards, still keeping watch — but the project is now demonstrably theirs. Most generational handoffs in wine involve some smoothing, some commercial concession, some quiet loss of whatever made the founder's work matter. The Foradori children appear to have done the opposite: they have deepened the project, pushed it further into farming, further into the table, further from any need to chase recognition. The Lezer is a small piece of evidence — a wine that did not need to exist, made because the climate is changing and someone in the cellar was paying attention.
We have always been drawn to producers who treat the wine as one thing the farm happens to make, rather than the reason the farm exists. There are not many of them. Foradori is one.