Producer profile: Vignamaggio
This beautiful Tuscan estate has a noble history dating back seven centuries, and is now being led into a sustainable future by a true son of the local soil. By Monty Waldin
Monty Waldin discovers the organic Tuscan estate aiming to be an ‘oasis of biodiversity’
MoDERN-DAy owNERs of Tuscan Renaissance villas as historic and photogenic as Vignamaggio could be forgiven for simply sitting back and living off the sales of branded postcards, corkscrews and wine glasses. Vignamaggio has been a working vineyard and farm since at least 1404. This was a period during which cultural rebirth, or Renaissance, began to reshape both European thought – abstract concepts regarding religion, money, morality, science, art and architecture – and its physical landscape. Nowhere was this felt and seen more strongly than in what is today Tuscany’s Chianti Classico heartland.
Chianti Classico’s two extremities are florence – the home of Renaissance art – and siena – the home of Renaissance banking, whose patronage funded the former. Vignamaggio’s elegantly proportioned pink villa and grounds were created during this time by the Gherardi family.
A Gherardi niece called Monna Lisa Gherardini (b. 1479) was almost certainly a frequent visitor, although when in 1503 a local artist called Leonardo da Vinci (‘from Vinci’, meaning a town just to the west of florence) started painting her, he did so in his studio in florence itself – and thus were born both the Mona Lisa and a souvenir industry that still thrives to this day.
Modern renewal
Vignamaggio is located southeast of the town of Greve in Chianti and is therefore roughly midway between florence and siena, in the heart of the Chianti Classico region. Vignamaggio’s modern rebirth began in 1987 under Gianni Nunziante, a Rome-based lawyer. Having moved in to the villa in 1988, Nunziante renewed Vignamaggio’s somewhat neglected vineyards (then comprising just over 40 hectares) while tastefully installing new winemaking equipment and a gravity-fed winery in the ancient underground cellars. Under Nunziante, Vignamaggio’s red wines were representatively styled for that era’s zeitgeist: boldly coloured with ripe flavours of dark fruit, often with a noticeable but rarely intrusive sheen of oak.
one of his signature wines was a Cabernet franc, made from vines Nunziante discovered when doing a vineyard audit. The cuttings had originally arrived here in the hard-scrabble 1950s, carried from france by artists who appear to have been as irrationally fearful of potentially wine-less evenings in Tuscany as they were enchanted by the region’s famed light and landscapes. These potential magnets, and Vignamaggio’s proximity to florence, convinced Nunziante that this was the place to pioneer Tuscany’s modern renaissance in luxury farm tourism, or agriturismo. Guests could enjoy the full Renaissance experience, but with the hitherto elusive luxuries of both central heating and flushable wCs thrown in.
In 2014, Patrice Taravella took over Vignamaggio. He was born in 1953 to Italian parents who had moved to france between the world wars, oscillating between their home in Paris and a bolthole in Normandy where Patrice was born. ‘It was a rich situation,’ Taravella says, ‘to have two countries, two
languages, two cultures, two ways of living. My father could neither read nor write, but he worked hard to send me and my [four] brothers to school. He implicitly understood the value of learning.’ The origins of Patrice’s surname lie in the practices typical among impoverished and often illiterate rural folk of the time in Italy, whereby if no written records existed, children would be named after the town or landmark local to their place of birth.
As Patrice Taravella’s family were builders and engineers, he started drawing. ‘I drew farm landscapes, but not the farmers nor their animals. Just the buildings. I loved buildings that had been created by people who had made no architectural plans, using only whatever materials they found or scavenged locally. In Italy the brickwork on castles and noble buildings is covered by plaster [dark pink in Vignamaggio’s case]. But on the farm buildings you can see the stone, because it is left bare. In France it is the other way round.’
Individual merit
While Taravella is perfectly capable of drawing up architectural plans on his own – Vignamaggio’s winery is due to be tweaked again soon to make each wine’s journey
‘Wanting to follow tradition does not mean that you have chosen to come to a stop’ Patrice Taravella
through it smoother, while creating overall energy efficiencies – he is reliant on his team, headed by Carla Bani on the administrative side and Francesco Naldi in the vineyards. They have more than 50 years’ experience at Vignamaggio between them – but no one is looking backwards.
‘All Vignamaggio’s vines are in the commune of Greve and most of them are Sangiovese,’ says Naldi. ‘But they are in five different places and on seven different terroirs. We farm each block on its merits. The needs of a Sangiovese vine in the hamlet of Lamole on light, free-draining sandy soil potentially subject to heat stress are very different to those of Sangiovese vines on more water-retentive clay near the Greve river, or those in the Conca d’Oro [‘golden bowl’] sun-trap in the hamlet of Panzano.’
Doesn’t this make life difficult? ‘Well, we use grapes from two different zones for both the regular Chianti Classico [mainly Greve and Lamole] and for the Riserva [mainly Greve and Panzano]. We have always had a mindset of farming each plot on its merits, to try to prevent problems from occurring, rather than trying to stamp out problems later. We have changed the pruning in some older vineyards to achieve more even ripeness. In this case it meant spending more on labour during spring, but the pay-off is more grapes of better quality in autumn. We see it as a win-win.’
Organic practices have been implemented across Vignamaggio’s entire vineyard since 2014, and for Naldi the difference is clear in the wines. ‘The tannins in the reds are not so aggressive,’ he says. ‘The fruit flavours – and here the dominant one is of dark plum – are more vivacious. Overall there is a sense of more elegance, of a wine more in tune with itself.
‘Our oldest clients, meaning those who have supported us over the 27 years I have
‘We always have had a farming mindset eachof plot on its merits, to try to prevent problems from occurring’ Patrice Taravella
been here, have noticed the change. And more importantly, they support it.’
Bigger picture
Taravella does not see organics as an end in itself. Instead, he sees Vignamaggio becoming what he calls ‘a small oasis of biodiversity’, with vegetable and herb gardens, olive groves and fruit orchards; wheat, whose flour will be baked into bread in the estate’s own oven; and livestock, in this case pigs.
‘As pigs love foraging for acorns in the forest, this is where we have put them. Their manure is a useful addition to our compost,’ he says, meaning the manure provides the compost pile with a range of microbes that make the soil more appealing to earthworms.
But when Taravella speaks of replicating the kind of mixed farms the Medicis first created, which were so beautifully drawn by Bartolomeo Bimbi in the 1500s, is he not at risk of trumping substance for style? ‘No, my view is one revolving around evolution,’ he says. ‘If I really wanted to be living in 1550, to go back to that, I would not be alive! Wanting to follow tradition does not mean that you have chosen to come to a stop.’
Tradition in this case, he says, is ‘not trying to re-do the past, but wanting to create something that has conservation of the past at its heart, while being the “vineyard as a farm of the future”.
‘Luxury is not money, nor is it silver and gold,’ he concludes. ‘True luxury is knowing exactly what you have on your plate.’ Or in your wine glass.
Monty Waldin is DWWA Regional Chair for Tuscany, and author of Best Biodynamic Wines