Ca’ del Bosco

Under the immense golden cupola thirty-three thousand Cuvée Prestige bottles create reflections that chase each other like so many sparkling bubbles. The light slides across the glass surfaces, breaking up into dizzying and hypnotic flashes of soft amber. The luminous cavern breathes all around us in a silent underworld. The winery’s heart has been imagined as an enormous upside-down bottle, reached by crossing a nautically inspired walkway and defying the traditional categories of design. It is simultaneously an immersive experience, an emotional vision and a series of theatrical stage effects. Here in the depths of Franciacorta, twenty-three metres below ground, beats the heart of Ca' del Bosco, a winery that has chosen to transform wine into a total language, 
To understand the range of this project we must go back to the beginnings and the small wood in the Erbusco hills bought by Annamaria Clementi in the late 1960s as a place for family vacations. It was Annamaria’s son, Maurizio Zanella, who later transformed it into one of Italian winemaking’s most visionary ventures, but everything began in the two hectares, that in fifty-five harvests, have become more than two hundred and eighty. The same oak tree, now the winery’s symbol, still stands at the centre of the circular courtyard, greeting visitors. Around this is an architectural space in which the stages of fermentation, aging on lees and the long maturation of cuvées wines have been imagined as part of the design project, created in close collaboration with Falconi Archittetura Studio. The collaboration dates to the mid-1990s, when Roberto Falconi showed Zanella a sketch he had made quickly on paper: that gesture marked the beginning of a thirty-year relationship that has now passed into the hands of his son, Gabriele Falconi. 
The architect explains that, "the initial idea was of camouflaging everything inside the hill, with a large concealed construction dug deep into the earth, protecting the wine and maintaining a constant temperature and humidity". From these deeply technical necessities was created a forty thousand square metre underground geography, through which visitors are guided on an experiential journey. In more recent work, completed in 2023, this relationship, between function and aesthetic has been taken further, each space giving visibility to what is usually hidden in a dialogue with contemporary art that runs through every space.
Outdoors, Arnaldo Pomodoro's Solar Gate creates a symbolic threshold, leading out to the vineyards. A little beyond, Igor Mitoraj's Heroes of Light displays its classical and wounded beauty and the unexpected apparition of Cracking Art's blue wolves emerges from the greenery. Each work has a relationship with the landscape and accompanies the journey underground, where the light becomes dim and the senses expand. 
"We were interested in creating a slight dislocation, a feeling of intoxication even before tasting the wine" continues Falconi. 
Entering the heart of the cellar, the sudden spatial compression creates unstable perspectives that are cinematic. The end of a sloping corridor, designed with a nod to Baroque perspective, appears to constantly recede, its measure elusive. 
In the Dome of Senses sounds are muffled and time seems to slow down. In this scenography, curated by Andre Guidot, artist and founder of Trama Creative Studio, the essence of wine is discovered through sight, smell, touch and hearing. At the centre is Ludoscope, a work by Paolo Scirpa, master of immaterial art, that casts a well of light into the depths. In the pupitres gallery, light filters through the myriad holes of wooden racks used in the remuage process of tilting and turning wine bottles, creating fantastical constellations in an artificial sky.
In the tunnel dedicated to the Millesimati Vintage Collection, bottles form a continuous pattern of compact walls that draw the gaze towards the silent archaic presence of Witness by Mimmo Paladino. Beside it, the historic cellars guard vintages dating back to 1972, in a timeline that describes both the evolution of the winery and that of the terroir. In this alternation of the practical and the amazing, the wine tank area is also a visually intense scene. Full-length glass walls reveal the interior to be a hyper-technological back-stage, with Stefano Bombardieri's life-size rhinoceros in impossible equilibrium hanging above huge metal cylinders in The Weight of Time Suspended while Zheng Lu's Water in Dripping steel sculpture is a transformation of splashes of liquid. 
Re-emerging into the light, the Franciacorta hills feel different. The rows of vines follow the contour of the land, the light softens and the landscape is tranquil. Yet something remains in the mind’s eye. In the continuity between functional and sensory we recognise a vision that is similar to Edra’s, a form of sensitive intelligence capable of combining rigour with freedom, precision with imagination, and where form is never merely decorative. Nothing is added simply to amaze. Each detail contributes to creating an experience that is intense and necessary. Only in this way can the true nature of wine be revealed: time taking shape, material becoming perception, memory being inhabited.