It’s in the vineyard, first and foremost, that we shape the character and the quality of our wines. Our two vineyards at Braccia Larghe (near Montecucco) and Porrona extend for 10 acres and are located around the town of Cinigiano, at 325 m elevation.
Suspended between the Tyrrhenian Sea and Monte Amiata, our area has an extraordinary microclimate for winegrowing, with sunny, dry summers and a wide day-night temperature variation that helps to intensify flavours and conserve acidity in the grapes.
We grow Shiraz and Sangiovese on a variety of different soil types, ranging from alluvial loam over limestone to clay loam. The vines are rainfed and managed carefully with winter and summer pruning to contain yields and maximize the fruit quality.
We’re blessed with an abundance of biological diversity around our vineyards, surrounded as they are by woods, hedgerows, meadows and with creeks running by the bottom of both vineyards, and we’re striving to work by the motto “tread lightly on the planet”. Our vineyards are managed in an earth-friendly manner – with minimum tillage, organic fertilization, and plant health management that looks to the agro-ecological approaches of sustainable viticulture.
Shiraz (or syrah) – the variety behind legendary wines from France and the Antipodes – has long been grown as a blending variety in Tuscany, but recently has risen to prominence there as a star in its own right, yielding reds of great character and distinction. We have made Shiraz our signature red, combining our expertise from Down Under with a good hunch about the potential for making fine reds from this variety in our part of the Tuscan Maremma.
Sangiovese is the Tuscan red grape variety per eccellenza and – true to form – our two Sangiovese vineyards at Porrona and Braccia Larghe, both polyclonal plantings, yield medium-weight, structured reds of great finesse.
Our winemaking practices are simple, yet knowledge-intensive.
We craft our wines to express the variety, the vineyard and the season, and some natural variation among years is normal. Elegance and intensity of character, on the other hand, are the constants in our wines.
Shiraz and Sangiovese ripen at different times and are fermented separately. The grapes are hand-picked; then de-stemming and crushing is followed by fermentation at controlled temperature with the use of pumping over, punching down of the cap and occasional rack-and-return until dryness to manage extraction of colour and phenolics. After draining and light basket pressing, the wine is matured in well-seasoned French oak puncheons: this practice promotes the evolution of secondary flavours and aromas while keeping the fruit forward and the wood in its place.
The finished wines are clarified by traditional fining methods and bottled to mature for a further 4-6 months before release.
OUR TEAM
an extended family with far-reaching roots in the world of wine…
Alison Jane Hodder
Kangaroo Winemaker
Claudio Berlingieri
The Manciple
Alfredo Buonomo
The Comptroller
Alberto Cagneschi
The Maremmano