Il Borgo del Balsamico

Two sisters in Reggio Emilia making balsamic in barrels from the 1700s.

It began as a father's obsession. In the 1970s Renzo Crotti — a textile entrepreneur with no plans to sell vinegar — started buying batteries of aged casks from the noble families of Reggio and Modena who were letting the tradition go out with them. He bought them full, kept them in the attic, and never sold a drop: for thirty years the balsamic was only ever given away.

His daughters, Cristina and Silvia, turned the inheritance into a house in 2004, at the family villa in Botteghe di Albinea. Under its roof sit more than nine hundred caratelli — the oldest five hundred from the 1700s and 1800s — in oak, cherry, juniper, ash, chestnut, and acacia, doing their slow work through the seasons the attic lets in. "In wine, you go down to the cellar," Cristina says of her craft. "In our world, you climb to the attic."

The sisters run against their market's habit in one visible way: their labels tell you what a bottle is for, not how many years it can boast. Age is in the bottle either way. The label's job, they hold, is the table.

That use-first habit is why their shelf makes sense at first sight, ten thousand kilometres from Albinea. Casa carries the ladder complete: Yellow for dressing, Red for finishing, and the wax-sealed Tradizionale for the drop. Where you start depends on your kitchen; where the bottles came from is the same attic either way.