Celebrating Ten Years of Clos Roareti with a unique label designed by Jacob Hashimoto

The name “Clos Roareti” combines two elements: ‘clos’, which in Mediterranean countries is a walled vineyard, and ‘Roareti’, which is a dialect version of Rovereti, the name of the estate, purchased by the Rizzardi family in 1810. It also expresses the two complementary components of the wine: the local terroir of Negrar in Valpolicella, and the international grape, the Merlot.

For 2017, the tenth bottled vintage on the market (13,333 numbered bottles), we chose to commission a special label and asked Jacob Hashimoto, an old friend of Giuseppe Rizzardi, to interpret the wine, its land and its history.

Hashimoto, born in 1973, is an internationally renowned, contemporary American artist of Japanese origin. He has exhibited with Galerie Forsblom in Helsinki and Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, among others, and has been represented in Italy by Studio la Città since 1998.

Through his own visual language, Jacob has created a label that explores and illustrates the relationship between art, land, science, and creativity.

The label is built on a grid of kite-like elements (a key element in Hashimoto’s particular visual language) and on each of these kites, Hashimoto has illustrated a grape or cluster of grapes that grow in number per row, each row representing the early moments of the Fibonacci sequence, a sequence, a pattern that we also see evidenced throughout the natural world.

The ten rows represent the 10 years of the vintage, changeable and ever expanding in complexity as the wines and vines travel through the years. To capture a wine in an image is an impossibility, and here, Hashimoto strives not to capture the vintage, but to capture an analogue of the process:  the annual toil, the repetition, the calculation, and the inevitable transformation of the winemaker’s specific, complex relationship to the land.

Giuseppe Rizzardi is Clos Roareti’s creator and caretaker and he has written his own record of change and time in these ten vintages – portraits of life, written through water and soil. The label is a creative and particular balance of chaos, intuition, and control, much like the wine.