The wine shop

La Bottega de ll'Arte del Vino was founded almost 100 years ago in Milan, on Via Ferrante Aporti, along the embankment of the Central Station , when trains still directly supplied shops. It was born from Gianfranco Balzaretti 's love of good wine, still sold in bulk in the family shop. He would go on to become one of the first Italian sommeliers to graduate from the Valdobbiadene School of Oenology, as well as a much-loved merchant among the Milanese, who were notoriously always receptive to a good glass of wine at the table, despite war and misfortune (or perhaps precisely because of it). He would also be the first to decide to bottle wine in his shop.

When in 2003 the large railway warehouses beneath the station tracks were declared unfit for business, the now elderly Balzaretti feared having to close shop, especially since none of his three daughters seemed particularly interested in wine. But the Ranieris, Paolo and Gilda , customers of Balzaretti's (thanks to their shared passion for wine, a friend and collaborator at the accounting firm where Gilda also worked), had no intention of seeing their beloved local wine shop close: they took over the business and moved it nearby, to its current location at Via Fara 25 , in the rooms of what, coincidentally, had been a wine shop since the second half of the 19th century.

Balzaretti remained in the shop with the Ranieris until 2006, teaching Paolo (and his very young son Roberto) everything he knew about wine, including logistical subtleties such as the importance of always placing the boxes with the edges aligned and the white wines, more sensitive to temperature changes, always underneath the reds. Paolo , born in Trieste in 1952, gradually became the soul of the shop and until 2014 he began to modernise and expand not only the premises, but also the concept of the wine shop: he expanded the offer, but with the same attention to great foreign wines as to small Italian producers, to the rarest labels and the most popular products, and also expanded the "convivial" aspect, creating a sort of "psychogeographical collection" of wine and good living, a neighbourhood meeting place for friends, enthusiasts and neophytes who never disdain a good glass, perhaps together with a particularly suitable culinary specialty and a couple of passing conversations: the empirical proof of Ranieri's axiom according to which "any wine finds its nobility in the right way of pairing it". Whether it's environmental influence or genetic predisposition, it's no surprise that his son Roberto followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a sommelier with AIS and taking over the shop, where you'll find him every day alongside Claudia and Valentina (also passionate sommeliers).