Fattoria Poggerino

The area’s viticultural history goes back a century or three, but its reputation was for breaking hearts and bank accounts with tannic overload and unchecked acidity. To make matters more difficult, his parents’ vineyards bore some dubious hallmarks of Chianti’s shot-in-the-dark ’70s. The vine spacing was tuned less to the terroir than to the tractor market, sacrificing density on the altar of diesel-fueled convenience. “The idea was to build the vineyards for the big tractors,” as Piero puts it. “Now we build tractors for the size of vineyards.” Of the four permitted Chianti Classico varietals, Poggerino was overloaded with the white ones, malvasia and trebbiano—which in the bad old days could account for up to 30 percent of the blend filling the aptly named fiasco bottles whose straw-laced sheathing ruined Chianti’s rep for a generation. And as for the secondary red varietal, “There are two types of canaiolo,” Piero says: “Good canaiolo and bad
canaiolo. And I had the bad canaiolo.”

Yet the land itself brimmed with potential. “I was able to make good wine soon, because some of the sangiovese was very good—not on account of the clone selection but because of the terroir.” Ripeness had always been the problem in Radda’s relatively high, cool vineyards, but the hot vintage of 1990 brought a turning point—and a coveted “3 bicchieri” rating from the Italian wine bible Gambero Rosso.

As the decade progressed Piero transformed the estate. Chasing warmth, he planted vineyards lower down his slopes. He zeroed in on sangiovese, planting smaller-berried clones whose high skin-to-juice ratios amplified fruit concentration. To the same end he planted at higher densities—going from about 3,300 vines/hectare to 5,000. Under the tutelage of an older winemaker he’d hired to hedge against his own youthful inexperience, he pursued the zeitgeist for oaky lushness, cutting clusters freely at veraison and racking 20 or 30 percent of his juice in new oak barriques. “That,” he smiles, “was the ’90s.” Which is to say, he still hadn’t found what he was looking for.

Yet a simultaneous shift toward organic farming was about to bring him closer. Revolted by the way chemical treatments stuck to his skin after a day in the fields, and the taste they left in his mouth, Piero thought briefly of selling out rather than sticking to the status quo. He probably could have fetched enough to spend the rest of his days in some distant paradise. But he discovered that he wasn’t dreaming of paradise; he was committed to stewardship.

“I realized that the land was mine, but it was also for everybody,” he says. Whoever comes after me must find it in the best possible state.”

He earned organic certification in the mid-2000s—setting the stage for an even deeper dive into biodynamic farming. The transformation was fortuitously timed, because something else was happening while he was having his personal epiphanies: “The weather started to change.”

In the face of new extremes—heat like a vice grip that no longer relents overnight, or ages without rain until an outburst of soil-scouring torrents—Piero and other growers have noticed that organic and biodynamic methods seem to buffer the vines. “They are happier, stronger, more efficient,” he says. “The roots are deeper and better organized.” Composted hummus and “green manure” cover crops between the rows (barley and other grasses, favas and other nitrogen-fixing legumes) seem to insulate the soil from parching temperatures. The old challenge was attaining sugar ripeness. “The new challenge is to lose less water from the ground,” he says. And grapes are like any other plant: “What you see on the outside is the result of what’s under the ground.”

As butterflies flitted around the vine-row cover crops and Piero’s connection with the land deepened, he also started thinking differently about how it could be expressed most faithfully in the glass. The winemaker who’d guided his beginning years had become something a second father, but Piero was ready to declare independence. “I felt I had to do wines myself. I had the feeling that making wine with less body, and more elegance, was best way to show the real potential of my land.”

He started in the cellar, phasing out small barriques in favor of bigger French oak tonneau. In 2010 he bought his first big barrels, 20/25-hectoliter casks of Slavonian oak—harkening back to one of the region’s more venerable traditions. The same year, he installed some of the most eye-catching implements you’re liable to find in an old-world cellar: colossal concrete eggs in which he ages sangiovese for his punningly named Chianti Classico N(Ouvo). Their shape creates subtle temperature gradients that cause the wine to swirl in a “slow batonnage” as it seeks equilibrium, delaying sediment settlement while the inner concrete shell imparts micro-doses of oxygen—“a little bit like oak, but not as much,” says Piero, who likens his eggs to terroir intensifiers.

The vineyard experiments proceeded apace. In response to the new heat regime, Piero planted higher. He transitioned to bilateral Guyot training and a pruning system emphasizing smaller, less frequent cuts aimed at extending their longevity. They’ve responded with amplified vigor—so much so that he’s begun retaining considerably more clusters after veraison. “Now the climate is different—but the vineyards are in better balance,” he explains. “I can slow down the ripening of the grape, because we have very efficient vines that can keep going into August.” He still does a green harvest, but now it’s a “late green harvest” of completely dark grapes—whose juice he bleeds to make a saignée rosé, before using the skins as a force-multiplier for the red wine.

And Poggerino’s flagship reds, well, they aren’t the Chiantis of yesteryear—whether you’re talking about Classico’s white-grapes-galore era or the oak-addled, high-octane, add-some-cab Super Tuscans of the 1990s. Muscular but supple, these pure sangioveses (and one sangiovese-merlot blend) burst with tightly coiled, sappy fruit galvanized by high-toned acidity. Leathery-sweet, age-worthy tannins are veined with minerality drawn from the estate’s crumbling chunks of galestro schist. These wines are fervent—headstrong even—yet limber and lively.

They taste, in short, like a never-ending quest to catch Radda’s soul in a bottle.