The Hill His Father Never Left
Ettore Germano was a grafter.
Not a winemaker, not a cellar master — a vine grafter. He travelled the Barolo appellation for decades, replanting vines for producers who needed it, doing the work that precedes every great wine and appears on none of the labels.
He grafted Nebbiolo onto phylloxera-resistant rootstock on hillsides that now carry famous names. His own name is not on those bottles.
His name is on his son's.
Sergio Germano inherited the estate and a question: what do you do with land your father spent a lifetime tending for other people, and his own parcels — Cerretta and Prapò, on the eastern flank of Serralunga — that he never quite got to bottle on his own terms? Sergio was the first to bottle the entire production, beginning in 1993. Ettore had taken the first steps toward bottling, but Sergio was the one who completed it.
The estate is named Ettore Germano. The son put his father's name on the label and kept it there. Not sentiment exactly. Recognition. The land was Ettore's understanding first. The decision to stay on it, to graft and tend and eventually bottle, was made by the man who is not named on any of the wine he made possible.
Cerretta and Prapò are both on the eastern slope of Serralunga, where the soil alternates between limestone marl and sandy clay. The wines from here are dark, mineral, built for decades. They carry the hill the way the hill was always meant to be carried.
Sergio walks the same ground his father walked. Different reasons to be there. Same attentiveness.
Ettore Germano, Serralunga d'Alba. Estate roots to 1856. Sergio Germano farms Cerretta, Prapò, Lazzarito, and Vigna Rionda. The estate is named for Sergio's father, Ettore, who died in 2005.
