Three centuries of history in the heart of upper Piedmont

A notarial document from 1671 attests that Comino Sella acquired vineyards in Lessona as an investment of cash surpluses from the family's industrial textile activities. Between the 17th and 19th centuries numerous sales deeds demonstrate the desire of the family's descendants to invest in vineyard land in Lessona.Between the 1830s and 1840s, Giovanni Giacomo Antonio Sella had the main villa and the outbuildings built right on the top of the Zoppo vineyard, an excellent cru for exposure, in all likelihood the same one already mentioned in a deed from 1436. Around 1870, in the division of the inheritance between the three sons of Maurizio Sella, Gaudenzio, Quintino and Giuseppe Venanzio Sella, it was the latter who took over the Lessona properties.

The Sella family decided to expand the estate and invest in the still mostly rugged and wild territory of Villa del Bosco to plant vineyards. Between 1882 and 1884 Carlo Sella, on behalf of Giuseppe Venanzio's heirs, progressively purchased the various lots of the "Bramaterra" property from the Municipality of Villa del Bosco and commissioned Don Paolo Antoniotti, a priest and man of science, to take care of their reclamation. In the years 1892-1893, based on a design by Gaudenzio Sella, the construction of Cascina Bramaterra began, the rural building that still dominates the estate today.A few years later, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Bramaterra vineyards came into production; the wine that was produced was, finally, and still is, "Bramaterra".After the death of Giuseppe Venanzio, great-grandfather of the current owners, the management of the vineyard was continued by his sons - great textile industrialists - and above all by his wife Clementina Mosca.From the 1930s onwards Venanzio (1901-1990) took over the management of the company until the mid-1980s, continuing in the direction of qualitative excellence and becoming an active part in the process of obtaining the D.O.C. obtained in 1976 from Lessona and in 1979 from Bramaterra.His son Fabrizio (1929-2001) took over as head of the company.