A winemaker in the Maremma region has produced Tuscany’s first braille wine label. Cantina La Cura, in Massa Marittima, has incorporated braille into the labels for its bottles of Vedetta, a special type of Cabernet Sauvignon produced only in the winery’s best years.
Enrico Corsi, owner of La Cura, explained that the idea came to him after attending a ‘dinner in the dark’ organized by his local chapter of the Unione Italiana Ciechi e degli Ipovedenti, Italy’s association for the blind and partially sighted. The dinner, Corsi explained, helped him begin to understand the difficulties the visually impaired experience daily. Corsi’s own wines were served at the event, yet he had trouble touching and pouring from the familiar bottles, feeling unsure if he was holding a red or a white. ‘I quickly realized that it wouldn’t take much effort for me to communicate something about the product to those who can’t see it—they didn’t necessarily need to see the container,’ he explained.
Coincidentally, Corsi purchased some Monte di Muro vineyards in a hillside area known as Poggio Vedetta—‘lookout hill.’ Shortly thereafter, Corsi teamed up with the association for the blind in Grosseto, which managed the label translations.
Adding braille costs an extra five cents per label—a small price, Corsi said, to give the visually impaired the gift of leggere il vino (‘reading the wine’). Corsi plans to add braille to all of his labels, including his Merlot La Cura, the cellar’s most prized wine, named Italy’s best Merlot at the 2010 Aldeno competition, and the Predicatore, a sweet wine.
