A while ago, in 1984, Montalcino stole my heart. I am a nature photographer and these landscapes – as our poet Ungaretti put it – “flooded me with the light of the immense” and simply stole my soul: I needed to have a house here.

So, in 1987 I began searching for my Tuscan home without even dreaming about producing wine: I was a wine lover who thought he was too old to enter this world made of incredibly long waiting periods.

Every estate proposal was either too big, too expensive or not suitable… so it took ten years before my friend Carlo Vittori called me and said: “I found the place, hurry up here and take a look, before the housing prices in Montalcino explode!” And, recalling his words now…how right he was!

So, I made it to Tuscany driving from Switzerland (I used to live there) and after six hours drive, I met a shepherd who was casually taking his afternoon nap under a centenary oak tree. His sheep were bleating and ruminating around him and the big white Maremmano Shepherd dogs were running in a circle keeping the herd in place. Two of these dogs, mother and daughter, were so wild that they were eventually left behind, ending up staying with me: the shepherd couldn’t make them get onto his truck the day he moved. And when a few months later I asked him what I was meant to do with them, he candidly told me with his strong Sardinian accent to just shoot them, which I obviously never did.

I immediately understood that this was my place. The place of my life.

The beauty, the distance from what we would call “civilization”, the absolute absence of the horrible architectural slaughter of the last century that has destroyed so many Italian landscapes. That’s where we are: a land in the middle of the UNESCO World Heritage site Orcia Valley, with the perfumes that pervade all year long around these hills, the deep view to the east on Monticchiello and Montepulciano, the prehistoric volcano Monte Amiata to the south, the near amphitheatrical hills protecting Le Ripi to the west and north sides… all of this was spectacular…

The estate was so uncontaminated. Unpopulated for thousands of years with poor and dry soil that gave very poor crops, it reaches over 40°C in summer and freezes lakes during winter, with 400-year-old olive trees, forests of many different trees and shrubs, and flowers – flowers, flowers everywhere – all year round. Not to mention wild asparagus, Porcini mushrooms, blackberries, the white and black truffles that only my friend Francesco’s dog was able to unearth, the wonderful red “corbezzolo” (arbutus), as well as wildlife, with rabbits and deer, boars and porcupines, wolves and yews, badgers and foxes, eagles from the Amiata Mountain and herons, buzzards, hawks, and the storks passing by the Orcia river twice a year, or all kinds of ducks that come into my lakes.

This is my dream come true: Podere Le Ripi

If we want to keep all learning processes alive, the main attitude is that of humility. “You shouldn’t gloat about anything you’ve done; you ought to keep going and find something better to do”.
(David Packard, co-founder of Hewlett Packard)

I believe that an open mind is able to increase sensitivity and that it is only possible if somebody is capable of very high levels of self-criticism: in the production of excellence, sensitivity is “conditio sine qua non”.

Being receptive to criticism and learning is the best humbling attitude.

Respect should come first, our wines must be healthy. We believe that any chemical added to the soil will ultimately end up – even if in tiny quantities – inside our wines.

We have witnessed that science hasn’t been capable of detecting specific molecules that have been later considered dangerous for our health.

Therefore, we decided to avoid any non-natural chemical additive in the vineyards, as well as in the cellar where we only use small doses of sulfur (although we are in the process of eliminating it soon). There are two reasons for such practices: first of all, we do not want to run the risk of later discovering that something we had considered harmless it actually wasn’t and, moreover, we think that using chemicals or exogenous substances stains the image that nature imprints in our wines.