Poggio al Sole

After striking out in France, and then in Piedmont, he and his brother rolled the dice on a three-day trip to Tuscany “with little hope” of finding suitable land. And it looked like they wouldn’t, until, late on the third day, they climbed a hill overlooking the Benedictine abbey of Badia a Passignano, whose archives attest to a local history of wine production going back to the 12th century.

But the Davaz brothers didn’t know that yet. Completely encircled by a forest of oak, pine and cypress, it felt like a world apart. “We were alone on an island in the woods,” Johannes recalls. “It was a place with a true spirit. At that moment we had no expectations about wine and winemaking. We hadn’t understood that yet. We were fascinated by the environment—by the place itself. And in the arc of maybe half an hour, we had decided to buy this farm.”

The Poggio al Sole estate was 31 hectares of mostly woods, with about five hectares of sangiovese and another three planted to olives. No Alps, no pinot noir,—and what’s more, “We had no money. The bank lent us the whole sum and said, ‘Go try.’

“We were crazy,” Johannes would marvel three decades later. “It was the folly of youth.”

That’s what the neighbors thought. “What are these bambini doing?” local farmers whispered among themselves when Johannes and his wife Kathrin moved into the old stone house in 1990, speaking only Swiss German. The first growing season only amplified their incredulity, as Johannes carried out an aggressive “green harvest” after veraison, clipping untold grape clusters like they’d always done in Switzerland, where the vines could only produce so much ripe fruit in the cool climate. “You’re cutting grapes and throwing them on the ground!” a neighboring grower exclaimed in exasperation early on, for it would take years for this practice to become common in Chianti. “If you have too much, pick what you want to take yourself—and later I’ll take the rest!”

But that’s not how precision viticulture worked, and Johannes had no margin for error. Especially now that the house was filling with children: three sons in those first five years, and a fourth not long after that.

Valentino came second in 1992, the same year the family began adding new vines. Caught up in the exploratory spirit then sweeping over Tuscany, Johannes planted cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and syrah along with native canaiolo—though he would ultimately regard his experiments with novel sangiovese clones as the most important.

With low-yield techniques in the vineyards and open-minded blending in the cellar, the wines grew more balanced and less tannic as immature green notes dropped away to reveal lithe layers of red fruit and floral aromatics. They had depth and a beguiling structure, evoking not so much a backbone as the exquisitely interlocking wheels and pinions of a Patek Philippe pocket watch. And every new vintage found the boys in the mix—hopping on the tractor, giving a hand in the cellar, teaching their parents the Italian they brought home from school.

“They grew up like I did, in a family where every small hand was important to the success of the firm,” says Johannes.

The brothers were kings of the forest and knew every inch of the fields. “Work and life were very intertwined,” Valentino remembers. “You felt the exciting moments, and the tension at the kitchen table around harvest time, when things were always happening. We were working toward something.”

The incredible evolution of sangiovese clones intricately adapted to varied soil types and site conditions fueled a counterintuitive dynamic: new vines produced better fruit than old ones. So even when varietal percentages remained the same in certain bottlings in successive years, Johannes says, “the sangiovese has become much more important in the quality of the wine.” It convinced him that the traditional varietal in Chianti was the right one after all. Only at Poggio as Sole it came with a twist: his vineyards were, in a sense, getting younger.

But the boys were growing up—and hatching their own plans even faster than their father had years before.

“Living on a winery is a dream—I hear it every day from tourists,” Valentino laughs. “But when you’re 14, you see things a bit differently.” That was the year he left home, to pursue an education that incorporated a banking apprenticeship in Switzerland. Three years of schooling became more than a decade in finance and information technology, mostly in Zurich. His brothers all did the same, more or less: “We left, and my parents were by themselves.”

So as Johannes and Kathrin closed in on three decades of transformational stewardship—roughly quadrupling Poggio al Sole’s vineyard acreage, earning organic certification, and (not least) converting local skepticism into esteem—the future of the family’s estate was uncertain. Should they scale down the capacity they’d worked so hard to build? Sell the whole thing to some conglomerate? Then what?

History doesn’t repeat itself, but as Mark Twain quipped, it often rhymes. And in 2019 those thorny questions were put to rest with the arrival of another young married couple from Switzerland: Valentino and his wife Stephanie. Winemaking may not have been Valentino’s “personal North Star” as a young man, as he puts it, but the family business—going back to his grandfather—was, and that childhood “island in the woods” was too precious to let go.

Not least because Chianti is now confronting a huge and fascinating challenge—climate change—and Poggio al Sole is remarkably well-positioned to face it. Johannes and Kathrin first arrived just as the quest for adequate sugar levels was propelling a revolution in the propagation of faster-maturing sangiovese clones. The same logic prized sun-drenched south-facing vineyards at moderate elevations.

“But now, with so much heat, we have the opposite problem: too much alcohol,” Johannes points out, “and those southern-exposure slopes are perhaps now not the best.”

It’s an issue many winemakers are grappling with—trying everything from erecting shade nets to stripping extra leaves to cut photosynthesis. Some mad scientists have even tried bombarding juice with microwaves or ultrasound in hopes correcting the balance in grapes that hit sugar ripeness before phenolic maturity. But so far there’s no proven “magic sauce that will solve the problem,” Valentino says—except for something that Poggio al Sole has had all along: elevation, with slopes facing every direction. The last vineyard they planted topped 1,600 feet—high ground for Chianti—and faces the evening sun. Meaning a longer road to sugar ripeness, buoyant acidity, and ideal phenolic maturation.

“We came here 30 years ago, lived la bella vita, and found success,” Johannes says. “We were prepared for the possibility that none of our sons would take over. But it’s a great joy that Valentino and Stephanie have decided to press forward with this work—it has given us the push to think about projects in the longer term.”

For Valentino, the family legacy contains its own seeds. “There can be this expectation of, ‘Oh, now the young guys are coming in, so there will be this big change,’” he reflects. But he sees it rather like his father did at the beginning: discover how this special hill can express its spirit under conditions that never stop shifting, and avoid mistakes that could get in the way.

“We want to try to get what is there without trying to impose a personal idea,” he declares. “Just a clean and flawless execution.” The place and the family’s fidelity to it has always been the important thing. “Carrying that forward—that’s what motivates me.”