Avignonesi

The Free Bacchus Story

The Vin Santo goes into fifty-litre caratelli, is sealed, and is left in an unheated loft for about ten years. No temperature control, no topping up, no intervention of any kind — just the full swing of Tuscan summers and winters working on it. The yield off the dried grapes is minute.

Virginie Saverys came to the estate from shipping law rather than from wine. She took an initial thirty per cent in 2007 to help the previous owners out, bought the property outright in 2009, and had a biodynamic team in place inside a year. The conversion was not a marketing decision taken after the fact; it started almost immediately.

The scale is the interesting part. 175 hectares across eleven vineyards, ten in Montepulciano and one in Cortona, described in circulation as the largest certified biodynamic estate in Italy. We record that description as one we have not checked. The size itself is not in doubt.

Three certifications sit on the estate, and each audits something different: organic for the farming, Biodyvin in 2019 for the whole-estate system, B Corp in 2022 for the company itself. Very few wine producers hold all three.

Published sources disagree about which body certified the organic farming, and in which year, so we print neither. On an estate carrying three marks, the one we cannot source is the one that stays blank.