Corzano e Paterno

Before he stumbled across this pair of stony hills overlooking the ancient Via Cassia around 1972, Wendel Gelpke was a Swiss architect who specialized in ultramodern concrete-and-steel design. A chance encounter led him to purchase one—Corzano—from a Florentine count whose family had tapped out the sharecropped proceeds it had once used to fund wedding dowries. Later he bought the neighboring Paterno from descendants of none other than Niccolo Machiavelli. There wasn’t a bit of this beautiful earth, Gelpke would tell visitors, that wasn’t soaked in blood and studded with bones. Gnarled olive trees prickled its surface alongside sparse vines and tumbledown sharecropper houses with no running water or electricity. The modern architect moved in with his seven-year-old son Till, who remembers his father’s first attempt to reclaim the fields from dereliction: “Crazy as he was, he took a big Land Rover, drove to Sardinia, and bought his first 50 sheep.” To which the seller graciously added a geriatric donkey.

Goats would have cleared the land better, but Wendel was feeling his way forward one step at a time. It was a monumental undertaking. He shored up the old homes and dug trenches for vines, filling them with stones to promote drainage. He home-schooled Till, who soon began tending the flock amid a growing collection of helpers. Wendel’s sister Katerina came from Holland, settling into one of the houses with her husband Peter and their sons Aljoscha and Pascal. Wendel’s older son Wenzel came from England. Everybody pitched in. There was something magnetic about how these people inhabited this place. In 1977, Wendel met a Boston native named Susan Doran at Heathrow Airport. Within a month she had left the United States to join him on the farm. They eventually married and had three daughters, two of whom still live steps away from the villa where they were born—including Arianna, who now runs the winemaking operation along with Aljoscha.

That pattern became the warp and weft of Corzano e Paterno. Wenzel’s school mate Sophie joined the fold in 1979, and they married. Her friend Antonia was 15 when she first visited. She stayed, too, and has raised five children with Aljoscha while making sheep’s milk cheeses that are coveted by the best chefs in Florence. (Till’s flock now hovers around 650 sheep.) In 2018 their twins Willian and Oscar took up roles in their own turn.

“It wasn’t just about the work,” Susan reflects. “It was the fact that we enjoyed very much living together as a family and pursuing something that we thought—or we had been convinced, that Wendel had made us think, believe—was an exciting challenge, something that we all wanted to be part of.”

By the time Wendel died in 2001, he had built an estate—and more importantly, a family—capable of wresting a distinctive spirit from this revitalized land.

“If you don’t have special soil you will never be able to make a very interesting wine,” says Aljoscha, who oversees the vineyards. “You can make a good wine, but not much more. So you first have to discover that your soil is special.” Unlike Chianti Classico to the south, these hills were unsung when he first put his shoulder to the wheel as a boy. “Forty years ago, it was some olive trees. So it took a while to discover that this soil really has a capacity to make long-living and very special and interesting wines.”

Which took interesting people.

“It is an adventurous family,” reflects Arianna—one of many members to journey abroad before returning home. “We have mountaineers, sailors, hot air balloonists, chefs. We travel, we observe, we learn and bring back to our collective life what we have gleaned from these experiences.

“There is perhaps a correlation between winemaking and mountaineering,” she adds, nodding toward Aljoscha’s penchant for snowshoeing in the Swiss Alps. “Solitude in the vineyard work, stamina, a clarity of mind that you need for the final blending, and the complete dependence on weather patterns: These are all qualities necessary to achieve the summit of a mountain—or the best possible expression of a vintage.”

Arianna returned from her own adventures in 2005 and has had the run of the cellar ever since—some years strapping her own sons into baby slings to make the rounds of the barrels. “The composition of our soils lends to the making of delicate wines of a shy elegance without ever being intrusive,” she says. “In the cellar, extraction is very soft, with a certain percentage of whole bunches and long maceration time, with respect for the individual expression of our sangiovese.”

Delicate and elegant, we can vouch for—yet potency and persistence also dwell in the estate’s mineral-veined reds. Shy is not a word that often appears in tasting notes, but it has a certain logic at Corzano e Paterno. Fifty years after the work began, these wines now sing the full chorus of their terroir—but it took decades of collective effort to coax them all the way out of their shell.