There’s a moment when a winery stops chasing the market and starts leading it. Pasqua Vini crossed that threshold a while ago. This wine is the latest proof of it.
I’ll say it plainly: in a phase where the wine world must do more than accept change, it must have the strength to anticipate it, Pasqua stands today as the most dynamic, courageous, and innovative force in Italian winemaking. It shows this through projects, not press releases. And QuattroMani is exactly that: a promise kept.
The project was born from the meeting between Pasqua and Charles Smith, a winemaker based in Washington State, originally from California, someone who has always played outside the rules in wine. This is no surface-level partnership. Since 2025, Pasqua has been the exclusive global distributor of the House of Smith brands, K Vintners, Sex, and Real Wine, and holds a minority stake in Real Wine as well. The collaboration runs deep, built on structure rather than a single occasion. Its roots go back further still: the first ideas took shape eight years ago, contact with Smith began in 2021, followed by regular vineyard visits that led Smith to fall in love with the place. That affection, combined with tastings of the base wines alongside Riccardo Pasqua starting in 2018, gave rise to the idea holding everything together: a multi-vintage blend.
That’s where the heart of this wine lies, in the gesture of putting Old and New World into dialogue, with neither one yielding to the other. The Old World is the vineyard: Campiano, above San Giovanni Ilarione, in eastern Valpolicella. Nine hectares at six hundred meters, south-west facing, vines between twenty and thirty years old, trained using the guyot system in a ritocchino pattern, at low density. Clay-limestone soil, partly volcanic, with clay content reaching up to 50%, the legacy of ancient seabeds. Around it, forest shapes a cool, breezy microclimate. Its terroir that, in this area, calls for Corvina. Planting Pinot Noir here is an act of defiance. And that’s exactly the point.
The New World shows up in the winemaking choices instead, aimed at capturing the fullness of the fruit. Hand harvesting, a cold soak of a couple of hours, fermentation at 20-22°C with three to four punch-downs a day. After two days, the seeds are removed from the bottom to keep the wine from picking up overly astringent tannins, a watchmaker’s precision. Fifteen to twenty days between fermentation and maceration, followed by aging split between tonneaux (two years) and barrique (one year), lightly toasted first-fill French oak. Finally, the blend is assembled in steel, combining the 2018, 2022, 2023, and 2025 vintages, the stylistic signature that has become Pasqua’s most recognizable mark.
In the glass, the result lives up to the ambition. The nose is spicy: black pepper, cardamom, and that herbaceous freshness of freshly cut grass that keeps everything alert. The oak stays in the background, supporting rather than leading, making room for black blueberries and wild strawberries. On the palate it arrives fresh. The tannic structure is soft, neither invasive nor rough, and the multi-vintage blend gives it a drinkability that’s the hardest quality to achieve with Pinot Noir. Nothing forced, nothing muscular. A wine that imitates no one and asks no permission.
One last thing speaks volumes about how Pasqua understands innovation. The project inspired Resonance, Sara Ricciardi’s immersive installation at Palazzo Maffei in Verona: a geode standing over four meters tall that cracks open to reveal something new. Not a fracture that divides, a space that generates. It’s the right image for this wine. And for this winery.
QuattroMani isn’t a stylistic exercise. It’s confirmation of a method. Pasqua doesn’t wait for Italian wine to change,
it changes it. And it puts courage where it matters most: in the vineyard and in the cellar, before it ever reaches the label.
We tasted it in a suitably transgressive way, fitting for a wine like this. It happened during our Wine Summer Tour, which this year took us to one of the great homelands of Pinot Noir, Burgundy. We paired it with a foie gras scallop with fig compote and caramelized onions. A gamble. And the gamble paid off.
Company Profile
PASQUA VIGNETI E CANTINE is a Veronese winery owned by the Pasqua family, founded in 1925 and celebrating its first hundred years of activity this year. Recognised worldwide as a producer and ambassador of prestigious Veneto wines, the company’s ambition is to bring all its winemaking experience, consolidated over 100 years of history, into the future with renewed stylistic codes. Working alongside President Umberto are his sons Riccardo Pasqua, CEO, Alessandro Pasqua, President of Pasqua USA, and Andrea Pasqua, Head of Business Development. With the third generation in the company, Pasqua has become the House of the Unconventional, a research laboratory and a space for discussion, where quality and creativity take centre stage. In its centenary year, Pasqua was chosen by winemaker Charles Smith as the global distributor of the K Vintners, Sex and Real Wine brands, of which it is also a minority partner. Also in 2025, the Veronese winery invested in the wine project of actress and international style icon Carole Bouquet in Pantelleria, acquiring 70% ownership, thus combining a vision for wine production with the protection of the island’s cultural heritage.
PASQUA VINI
Via Belvedere 135, 37131 Verona – 045 8432111
www.pasqua.it – relest@pasqua.it
