The Faedo of 1975 was a place few outsiders associated with serious wine. Mario Pojer, a young winemaker, and Fiorentino Sandri, who had inherited family vineyards on the porphyric slopes north of San Michele all'Adige, started with two hectares and a single bottling: a 1975 Müller-Thurgau Palai that landed on the Italian wine scene with surprising weight. The wager was that mountain Trentino, between the Adige and Cembra valleys, could compete on character with the country's better-known appellations. Fifty years later, the estate works its founding hill plus high-altitude sites in Val di Cembra and Grumes, with Marianna, Matteo, Fiamma, Elisa, and Federico now joining the founders inside the company.
The Pojer e Sandri map is unusually three-handed for a Trentino estate. Faedo, the headquarters, sits on the northern fringe of the Piana Rotaliana, where porphyry meets Werfen sandstones, marls, and dolomite, and where the Ora del Garda blows up the valley most afternoons. Val di Cembra, ten minutes east, is the steeper face: porphyry terraces planted on slopes that touch 45% gradient, the kind of work the locals call viticoltura eroica and the kind of altitude (above 600 metres in places) that buys acidity in white grapes the lowland cannot match. Grumes, higher still and once farmland left to fallow in the 1950s, hosts the Zero Infinito project on PIWI varieties bred to resist mildew without copper or sulphur sprays.
The estate has a long habit of breaking process before adopting it. Pojer e Sandri were among the first Italian producers to bottle Chardonnay as a single-varietal label in the late 1990s. In 2002 they patented an in-reduction pressing system that recovers nitrogen from the press cycle and cuts sulphite use sharply, and they followed it with the now-distinctive grape washing step the cellar calls the idromassaggio. The 2013 Zero Infinito range carried that thinking to its logical end: zero chemical treatments in the vineyard, zero added sulphur, zero commercial yeast, zero clarifying agents, zero filtration. The line is now their loudest statement, a Cremisi sparkling rosato and a still red and white made by ancestral method.
Beyond the experimental edges, the estate is best read through three labels. Müller-Thurgau Palai is the founding wine, a mountain white with cold-cellar nerve and a salty, anise undertone that comes from the Faedo porphyry. Faye, a Cabernet and Merlot blend matured in barrique, is the structured red the family use to argue Trentino can carry international varieties at altitude. Nosiola, the local white that almost disappeared in the 1970s, is the grape the estate has spent most of its bandwidth defending: still, dry, and increasingly textural in their hands. Around those sit Riesling, Sauvignon, Pinot Nero, the rosato Vin dei Molini, and a separate distillery and vinegar line that share the same artisanal logic.
The estate runs guided cellar visits with structured tastings every weekday and Saturday morning, and keeps a small Maso accommodation in Val di Cembra for travellers who want to wake up inside the heroic-viticulture landscape. For UK drinkers the wines arrive through importers including Beaune and Manicaretti, but the most direct read of the philosophy still comes from the Faedo cellar at Loc. Molini 4, half an hour north of Trento on the road to Bolzano.