Podere Le Ripi

The Free Bacchus Story

Francesco Illy, of the Illy coffee family, went to Tuscany looking for a house and ended up with a farm a retiring shepherd was selling near Montalcino. The first Podere Le Ripi wine came from the 2003 harvest. Illy did not want to wait decades for old vines, so he tried what he himself called something ridiculous: planting Sangiovese so densely that the roots would be forced deep.

Montalcino is a hill town in southern Tuscany, and Brunello di Montalcino is its Sangiovese, the grape of Chianti, made to a stricter rule and aged longer before release. It sits at the firmer, more structured end of the Sangiovese family, and a Riserva is held back longer still.

The experiment became the Bonsai vineyard: 1.4 hectares planted at 62,500 vines a hectare, each vine giving about 200 grams of grapes. The estate dug down to see what the roots were doing and found them three metres deep, about twice as far as in a normally planted vineyard. Biodynamic farming began in 2012, and the estate admits it still keeps too few animals to make all the manure it needs. Then in April 2021 a frost at minus six degrees damaged 50 to 70 per cent of the vines and cost at least half the crop.

The EU organic register lists Podere Le Ripi under ICEA for its grapes and its wine. Demeter Italia lists it for wine grapes and olives; wine is not on that listing. Sebastian Nasello, who joined in 2012 and became a partner in 2014, runs the estate and makes the wine.

Lupi e Sirene, the Brunello from the vineyard that held the estate’s only Brunello licence in the early 2000s, is the flagship; recent vintages are released as a Riserva. Attenti al Lupo, a whole-cluster Tuscan red, is the easy way in at about a quarter of the price.