ALESSANDRIA — After living for three years in Barcelona, Roberta Bruno decided to return to the hills of Piedmont, in northwestern Italy, to revive the family business. She now lives in Turin, but her mother Enrica’s family roots lie in the hills of Strevi, in the province of Alessandria, and on steep banks of the Monferrato valley — a UNESCO World Heritage Site where the noble Muscat wines are born.
Since the early 1800s, her ancestors have produced Passito wines (wines made from grapes that are semi-dried prior to fermentation), which were praised among connoisseurs even a century later.
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For the past couple of years, Bruno has transformed those same rows of vines, and their historical legacy, into a tool for affirming and claiming the values and rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community. She founded GrinGhigna, the first queer vineyard in the Piedmont region and, perhaps, in Italy.
“I can’t tell if it’s the first one, but I certainly haven’t heard of any others so far,” Bruno says confidently from her booth at Alessandria Pride. “I proudly affirm my identity, I wanted to revive the family business in my own way, to create a representation of the queer community both in the agricultural sector and in this province. It’s not easy, but we are trying hard.”
She runs the business, assisted by her mother, who is passing on her generations-old secrets both on the tractor and among the vines. But the GrinGhigna project revolves around a small universe of a dozen or so people: friends and activists, all women or members of the queer community. A brave project that aim to chip away at the male-centric nature of Italy’s wine and agriculture sectors.
Named after witches
The first line of wines was produced in 2023 — six in all, for a production of 5,000 bottles, each bearing the name of a woman who was was accused of witchcraft for her innovative ideas or attitudes.
There is a sparkling wine called Sibilla, the Italian version of Sybil, a prophetess or oracle in Ancient Greece, “which gives credit to all Italian fortune-tellers,” Bruno explains. Then, there is Dorothea Muscat, named after Dorothea Flock, who was killed for witchcraft in Germany in the 17th century.
For me, wine is a means of inclusion, a social tool.
The Brachetto is named Agnes, in memory of Agnes Waterhouse, one of the first women executed for witchcraft in England. The Passito is named after pacifist and novelist Bertha von Suttner, the “witch of peace,” the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but whose name is often forgotten. The Barbera is called Ena, after the victim of a Spanish king who exterminated all the women of village, accusing them of being witches.
Out of the norm
The rosé is called Norma, which is both a woman’s name but also means “norm” in Italian. “The label was created by queer illustrators Mica and Elena, who, inspired by the name, crossed out the word, norma, as a tribute to all those bodies and declinations of the human being who are, precisely, considered unusual and outside the box,” Bruno says.
These are wines that have come to represent ideological and, in some ways, political acts. “The Norma label is like a queer manifesto; it is the very manifesto of my winery. For me, wine is a means of inclusion, a social tool, a feminist and queer project that I want to turn into a way to support my community. If my family had produced oil, I would have done it with that. But it produced wine, so that is what I used to pursue my ideas,” Bruno says.
