The House Cellar

The building’s underground storage: the stock of notable previous vintages that the Torchio’s practice requires, maintained across proprietor successions as a communal cultural asset rather than a personal commercial one. The cellar contains the most complete collection of older island vintages available for tasting anywhere outside the estate cellars themselves, including three bottles from the Mons Sereni estate’s best-regarded historical vintages. Betta has tasted them all. She knows, with a precision that no official document records, what the Mons Sereni estate’s wine actually tastes like across forty years of output. Her assessment of the past seven years’ exchange session winner is not what the official classification says it is.