Maculan renovates its support to eye research with Santalucia, Piwi for the first time

The partnership between business and research continues to create tangible opportunities in the fight against eye diseases. With this goal in mind, Maculan, the historic winery of Breganze and a symbol of Torcolato wine, together with the Banca degli Occhi del Veneto ETS Foundation, has launched the edition No. 17 of Santalucia, the charitable project which brings together the world of wine and support for scientific research. In recent days, a panel of wine and food critics, journalists, entrepreneurs and institutional representatives conducted a blind tasting of six samples and selected the barrel which will become Santalucia 2025. For the first time in the initiative history, the choice fell on a Piwi wine. The barrel will yield 300 unique, numbered charity bottles, with proceeds helping to fund the Lucy Project (lineage-guided use of cell therapies to improve outcomes in age-related macular degeneration), a study carried out in collaboration with the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, one of the most advanced research centers in the United States. The project is inspired by the work of Shin’ya Yamanaka, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, on retinal macular degeneration. This collaboration derives from the Fondazione Banca degli Occhi long-standing expertise in cell therapy and aims to reprogram patients’ blood cells into healthy retinal pigment epithelium cells to treat a disease that is expected to have an increasingly significant impact on the population in the years ahead.
The official unveiling of the 300 numbered bottles of Santalucia 2025 will take place on December 10th during the charity dinner traditionally hosted at Le Calandre restaurant, run by the Alajmo brothers in Rubano. Each bottle will feature an original hand-painted label created by the young artists of In.Perfetto, the creative workshop of the Vite Vere Down Dadi social cooperative in Padua, which is dedicated to providing vocational training for people with intellectual disabilities (the bottles can already be reserved by contacting the Fondazione Banca degli Occhi).
“Santalucia 2025 is good for our eyesight, but also for the environment”, explains Fausto Maculan, who leads the family winery. “This year, in fact, the panel selected a sample made from Piwi grapes, disease-resistant varieties which require fewer fungicide treatments in the vineyard. "We planted these varieties in 2007 with the aim of strengthening our sustainable approach to viticulture, and year after year they have delivered excellent results. The grape varieties are Cabernet Volos and Merlot Khorus, vinified in small stainless-steel tanks and then aged in oak barriques. Santalucia 2025 displays intense aromas of red fruit, while on the palate it is rich and rounded, with freshness and tannic structure which suggest a long lifespan and a fascinating evolution”.
“Thanks to Fausto Maculan and the Maculan winery - affirms Diego Ponzin, president of the Fondazione Banca degli Occhi - the Santalucia project has, for the past 17 years, provided us with an opportunity to meet supporters who care deeply about the goals of scientific research, as well as friends from the business community who stand alongside the Fondazione Banca degli Occhi in a synergy between scientific innovation and social responsibility. This year, our goal is particularly ambitious and focuses on a project aimed at treating retinal diseases, the leading cause of blindness in the Western world”, concludes Ponzin.