Described by his young oenologist Sebastian Nasello as a dreamer and a visionary, Illy decided he needed to expedite the winemaking process, even if it required doing something ridiculous. Between 2000-2010, Illy and his team planted all the vines that would eventually make his Podere le Ripi wine. “The idea was to oblige the vines to come very quickly and very deep with the roots in the soil in order to make a better wine,” Illy says, describing what is now known as the “bonsai technique,” which had technicians, oenologists, and everyone else in the wine business telling him he was crazy.

In Illy’s technique, vines are planted only one foot, four inches apart. Depending whom you ask, standard vine spacing starts around five feet and generally leaves enough room for a tractor to navigate the rows. At Podere le Ripi? “It’s extremely dense. You have difficulty walking inside that vineyard.”

One Illy did make an incredibly important contribution to the vineyard: architect Ernesto Illy, Francesco’s son, led the project to build Podere le Ripi’s Golden Cellar. In 2003, at only 20 years old, Ernesto designed the first sketches for what would be a 12-year project from start to finish, and resulted in a 750,000-brick, Roman-inspired cathedral of a cellar.

Ernesto’s cellar was built using the Golden Cut, an ancient geometric relationship that inspired the Parthenon’s façade, Dalí’s The Sacrament of the Last Supper, and of course, the measurements of Illy’s cellar. The cellar is made entirely of brick and completely free of cement, which breathes badly, and iron, which would negatively impact the soil beneath it.

Francesco recommends visiting the cellar in small groups to truly appreciate the structure’s beauty. “My feeling is that when you enter this place you feel the harmony,” Illy says. “I feel it. And I see it when people go in there. When you try to feel it, you feel it. It’s something different.”

His vinos are full-bodied, fresh, and neat, he says. They are perfectly clean, highly complex on the aroma spectrum, and have a round, velvety mouth taste.

And—other than to taste his wine—why should anyone visit Podere le Ripi? For the beauty, says Illy. “It’s extremely beautiful and it’s very, very wild with an incredibly beautiful panorama.”

Illy speaks often of beauty, and why wouldn’t he? He lives on 55 acres of a paradise, accompanied by a magnificent wine cellar designed by his son while in his twenties, that houses four wines Francesco can call his own. The moment I speak with him, he is on his boat on the Tyrrhenian Sea near a Sicilian island called Ustica, in the middle of a 2,000-mile, two-month annual journey from Tuscany to his hometown in Italy’s northeast, Trieste. His life is beautiful, but he is intent on sharing it with visitors like Ellen Rothschild, the recent vineyard visitor. She describes herself as someone that enjoys and appreciates wine without being a wine snob. “We really enjoy learning about wine and tasting the differences and sharing it,” she says. Her family liked Podere le Ripi’s product enough to bring home four cases of Brunello.

Montalcino is one of those places where, I’ll just come out with it, they don’t really take kindly to outsiders.

Though there are now over 200 producers within the Consorzio that oversees and regulates production in one of Italy’s most famous wine producing DOCG regions (against just 50 in the early 1980s) production is dominated by the big boys: typically 40% of the DOCG’s annual output comes from just six producers.

New arrivals are made scarce by the high price of land and tough barriers to entry, and the fact many wineries can point to an historic lineage dating back their links to the region for at least a few generations.

Which made the decision by Francesco Illy, heir to the famous Trieste coffee dynasty, to start a winery from scratch so unusual.

His critics have suggested he was driven by vanity and deep pockets. He says he was encouraged by a love of the Sangiovese grape and of Brunello di Montalcino in particular, and, it must be said, a desire to make his mark in a field in which he freely admits he had no knowledge.

“Although I had been looking for ten years before I found the Podere Le Ripi site in 1997 (he planted the vines three years later) I was pretty ignorant. Although I loved wine, my background, of course, is coffee. I must be honest: I’ve had a lot of luck,” he says, sitting in front of range of his wines including a vertical of his Brunellos from 2009-2012.

The first and most important piece of luck was finding such a wonderful site – no easy thing in Montalcino where virtually every square metre of land with wine-growing potential has long been snapped up by local producers.

Podere Le Ripi is a sloping 55 hectare site formerly owned by a shepherd, of which just 12.5% has since been converted to vines, the rest is forest and olive trees, but with wonderful clay and sandstone soil that is perfect for wine-making.

Production increased steadily from 2000 bottles in 2003, the first vintage of Lupi e Sirene, to around 30,000 today, with yields just 50% of the permitted maximum for the Rosso and Brunello wines. The winery converted to fully bio-dynamic methods in 2010.

Three or four wines are produced most years: an IGT Syrah (£22), an IGT Rosso (£22) a Rosso di Montalcino (£30) a Brunello (usually made as a Riserva which requires six months in bottle six years after harvest, priced at £72 a bottle) and a very expensive oddity, what is almost certainly the DOCG’s most expensive Rosso di Montalcino (retailing for £140), Bonsai.

Production increased steadily from 2000 bottles in 2003, the first vintage of Lupi e Sirene, to around 30,000 today, with yields just 50% of the permitted maximum for the Rosso and Brunello wines. The winery converted to fully bio-dynamic methods in 2010.

Three or four wines are produced most years: an IGT Syrah (£22), an IGT Rosso (£22) a Rosso di Montalcino (£30) a Brunello (usually made as a Riserva which requires six months in bottle six years after harvest, priced at £72 a bottle) and a very expensive oddity, what is almost certainly the DOCG’s most expensive Rosso di Montalcino (retailing for £140), Bonsai.

Bonsai is the fruit, so to speak, of one of Francesco’s more controversial moves.

Determined to get the most out of his site and his vines, he opted for vine density in the hope that the vines would take deep root.

Initially he planted 11,000 vines per hectare, more than double the 5000 usually considered optimal by winemakers, and in the experimental vineyard where Bonsai is made, he planted 62,500 vines per hectare, which means this wine is made “from the smallest vines in the world,” just 40 cms apart.

Little wonder that in a typical vintage (the 2010 is currently on release) just 600 bottles of this remarkable and highly concentrated wine gets made.

So how were the wines?

All the Lupe e Sirene Brunello Riservas were tasting great.

These are big wines that obviously get a lot of sun (reflecting Podere le Ripi’s location, to the south-east of Montalcino) and are powerful and fruit forward, with lots of dark berry fruit on the palate but good smooth tannins too.

Tasting a vertical from 2009 to 2012, the 2010 (a great year for Brunello) was perhaps the winner for sheer balance but also power, although the 2011 is more fruit forward, giving up front satisfaction already: these are clearly all young wines with a long, evolutionary life ahead of them. All have remarkable concentration.

But the two best wines for me were two of the most unheralded.

The just-released Lupe e Sirene Brunello 2012 wasn’t made into a Riserva because the vintage wasn’t deemed good enough but it seems that might have been a mistake. This wine is tasting remarkably well already, with lots of layered complexity that had me returning to it on more than one occasion.

A relative bargain at £55 reflecting its non-Riserva status.

The real surprise though was the 2009 Amore e Follia (Love and Madness) Syrah IGT Toscana, a really well made, fruit forward and bold Syrah that Francesco says ages like a Brunello. A fraction of the price though, and great value at just £22.

They may be relative newcomers in one of Italy’s most conservative and protected wine regions, but Francesco and Podere le Ripi clearly have a great future ahead of them, with their Brunellos but also – and especially so – with their IGT wines.

Well worth tracking down.

All the wines are available from Jeroboams.

It was a hot, late summer evening in Tuscan wine country — and, unexpectedly, I was getting a lesson in astrology.

Inside a grid of cool, lush green vines, amid hills and valleys rippling toward the horizon, a cherubic woman in a wide straw hat named Helena Variara was pointing toward the sky.

“You have days of fire, air and days of earth — the 12 constellations are our helpers,” she said matter-of-factly. “Our work is to enter the rhythm of the planets.”

Technically speaking, Ms. Variara’s work is also to make wine. She and her partner, Dante Lomazzi, own a tiny winery called Colombaia, tucked onto a hillside of northern Tuscany, outside Siena. “We work the soil on earth days,” Ms. Variara said. “We work the leaves on water days. The sugar in the grapes grows when the moon grows. So we only harvest after a full moon.”

After a pause, she added: “By the way, the water days are also the best days for eating salad.”

Ms. Variara’s practices may seem unorthodox, but her method (better known as biodynamic winemaking) is becoming more and more prominent among a small cohort of Italian winemakers. It follows an ethos composed in the mind of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner in the early 1920s, and the tenets are fairly simple: There can be no synthetic chemicals or mechanical irrigation. A true biodynamic farm must also grow a variety of fruits and vegetables, and there have to be animals, either domestic or wild, to keep this miniature ecosystem in check.

And Ms. Variara’s affinity for the constellations is not a personal idiosyncrasy. Biodynamic winemaking also mandates that the farmer adhere to a specific celestial calendar. Hence my astrology lesson.

Sebastian Nasello, the winemaker at Podere Le Ripi in Montalcino, explained it this way: “Organic farming does no harm to the earth. Biodynamic farming aims to make the earth healthier.”

People like Ms. Variara and Mr. Nasello are part of a movement of small vineyards; most produce about 10,000 to 20,000 bottles annually.

As a point of comparison, Goliath vineyards like Antinori, Frescobaldi and the other wines of the duty-free world produce millions of bottles a year and export them all over the world. In 2015, Santa Margherita sold over 19 million bottles in 85 countries, totaling 118,200,000 euros (about $130,000,000) in net sales.

Dante Lomazzi and Helena Variara, Colombaia’s owners, whose biodynamic method of winemaking is becoming more and more prominent among a small cohort of Italian winemakers. Credit Susan Wright for The New York Times

The biodynamic vineyards I visited export a few thousand bottles a year, if any, and the digits of their net sales numbers don’t usually exceed three or four zeros.

Unlike the giants of the wine world, these small, rough-hewed farms add no ingredients besides grapes and time to their wines (with the occasional exception of a pinch of sulfites to preserve the vintage). Where a company like Banfi or Antinori may get truckloads of grapes from all over the region delivered to a sprawling factory that also hosts tour buses, these biodynamic farms generally consist of a farmer, a tractor and maybe a few friends who come to help at harvest time. These farmers are the Davids.

What if the best way into the world of Italian wine was not on a tour bus, but walking through these tiny vineyards with these farmers as guides? It felt like unchartered territory, as if I was unpeeling the unknown side of Italian wine. And, as I would learn, it’s a world that only gets more fascinating the deeper in you go.

Officially, these wineries are not typically open to the public. Unofficially, such winemakers love nothing more than showing off their farms and vintages. For someone who is more traveler than tourist, these wineries provide the perfect entry into a part of Italy we don’t see very often, a part that has been untouched by throngs of tourists and Instagram clichés.

And, perhaps most fascinating of all, there is the deference to the occult.

“We bottle when the moon is descending,” Ms. Variara told me as we walked into her cellar. Each year Colombaia makes two red wines, a cloudy white and a tiny batch of sparkling pink and white wines. “You need the right moon because she’s alive. She knows she’s in a bottle.”

It took me a second to realize we were talking about the wine.

Far be it from me to say “she” isn’t alive. Biodynamic wines may seem like a quirk, a wine-industry outlier, but for the fact that the wine is fantastic.

“Helena’s wine has a soul,” said Brian Heck, a consultant who specializes in biodynamic wines. “It makes you want to be a better person.”

When I heard about people who worked according to a romantic voodoo of reading the phases of the moon, of using stars as a sort of extraterrestrial oenologist, I was fascinated.

Which is how I found myself in Italy (with my husband and two children) seeking out wineries like Colombaia: ones that are more farm than factory, exist in harmony with the land around them, and make some of the most interesting wine in the country.

The entrance to Stefano Amerighi’s winery, near the village of Cortona in Tuscany. Credit Susan Wright for The New York Times
“I can’t drink conventional wine,” Gabriele de Prato told me. “I can taste the chemicals. I can taste the temperature control. A conventional wine tastes dead.”

Handsome and tan, with a shaved head, leather bracelets and camouflage shorts, Mr. de Prato looks as if he’d be just as comfortable on the pages of a men’s fashion magazine as strolling through his farm. We were touring Podere Còncori, Mr. de Prato’s vineyard not far from Lucca, in an area known as Garfagnana. Podere Còncori produces several labels, including a syrah, a pinot blanc and (my personal favorite) a rich, elegant pinot nero.

“People think our methods are strange because we use the astrological calendar,” Mr. de Prato said. “But remember that European farmers have always used the moon calendar.”

He almost had me convinced. Until he asked if I had learned to bury a cow horn. By the look on my face, he rightly assumed I had not. “We fill a cow horn with flowers, herbs, manure, like compost,” he said. “We bury it for the winter. It goes into the warm part of the soil closer to the sun’s energy. In the spring we dig it up, mix it with water and spray the vines. It is a natural fertilizer.”

A short while later, Mr. de Prato walked me through his cellar. Between giant steel wine barrels, there was a massive table piled high with lush red tomatoes of all sizes (“You have to have a hundred tomato plants in Tuscany or you’re nobody”). He grabbed a handful of the smallest, rinsed them off and plopped them in a terra-cotta bowl with a sprig of fresh rosemary. It was time to eat.

We sat at the heavy wooden table in his tasting room with those tomatoes, plus platters of crostini, bowls of homemade pasta e fagioli and generous pours of Podere Còncori Melograno. “This is not a simple wine, it is more difficult, but it warms you up,” he told me.

There’s artistry and erudition in this world. It attracts Italians who retreated to the hills to think deep thoughts. Many of the farmers I met with were musicians, some painted, one quoted Ulysses, and all of them tried to educate me.

“You must read Goethe,” said Stefano Amerighi, leaving me to wonder how he knew I hadn’t. We were at his vineyard 150 miles southeast, near the village of Cortona. “‘The Metamorphosis of Plants’ explains our philosophy. Humans waste a lot. With the biodynamic methods you don’t lose anything, you use everything. Goethe will help you understand.”

Mr. Amerighi has long, wavy hair to his shoulders and a graying beard, wears distinguished tortoiseshell glasses and carries a burned-out cigar.

He led me down a dusty path that ran between his lush green vines. Though it was an oppressively hot afternoon, the world inside the vines felt cooler, almost air-conditioned. We arrived at his pasture, home to Mr. Amerighi’s Chianine, the famous white cows that are almost always fated to become bistecca alla Fiorentina.

“Monoculture is not agriculture,” he said stroking one of the cows under her chin. “A farm is like a human: You need a head and a heart and the organs to make the whole organism.”

He pointed to a group of cows gathered in the shade and said: “A few are pregnant. I promised my daughter I would never slaughter our cows. I think soon we will have many cows.”

Before I left, we toured the cellar. And as we walked in the dank air between big barrels of aging syrah, I noticed that the ceramic casks were all covered with chalk drawings of butterflies, stars and rainbows: the blissful, pastel-colored world of a 6-year-old girl. This cellar was a playground.

It was the starkest reminder that we were nowhere near a factory farm. Though they may be separated by hundreds of miles, these farmers are almost family.

“If there is a hailstorm, we call each other and ask advice,” Mr. de Prato had said to me. “There is no rivalry between me and Stefano and Helena and Arianna. I am so impressed with what Arianna has done.”

If this world has a matriarch, it is Arianna Occhipinti, although that’s hardly the word to describe her. Ms. Occhipinti, who started her biodynamic vineyard in southeastern Sicily in 2010, is 33 years old with a tangle of thick black hair, Mediterranean skin and big brown eyes — more Venus than Juno.

Occhipinti is one of the largest producers of biodynamic wine (over 120,000 bottles annually), and it was among the first to be recognized by critics as high-quality wine.

I met Ms. Occhipinti in the courtyard of her winery, not far from the historic city of Ragusa. We sat on wicker chairs surrounded by olive trees and lavender plants and sipped glasses of the Occhipinti Nero d’Avola, a lightly tannic red wine with what wine people call generous fruit.

Farmers like Ms. Occhipinti believe they “have a responsibility to the people of the future,” she said. “We are in a good moment: Young people are making wine, there is more sensibility. The most important thing is to think small, not: production, production, production.”

These biodynamic farms, I was realizing, are self-sustaining idylls. They grow what they need, they don’t produce much waste, they respect the land. I had become a believer.

It was right around that time that I let my small children roam freely — unseen, unsupervised — through the vegetable patch at the Fonterenza winery.

Fonterenza is run by two sisters, Margherita and Francesca Padovani. Fifteen years ago, the Padovani sisters transformed their childhood summer home, a 400-year-old palazzo in the hills of Montalcino, into a kind of winemaking Eden, a swath of Italian paradise removed from all the bad stuff in the world.

My children were pillaging the garden for ripe tomatoes and fallen plums. Through the thicket of cypress trees, I could hear their sounds of laughter, of playing, of a happy childhood. I was feeling pretty smug. Until I heard Margherita’s voice.

“They must watch out for vipers! They must! Children! If you see a snake, stomp the ground very hard!”

In an instant: a change of heart. Maybe chemicals aren’t all bad? Sensing maternal panic, Francesca suggested we go into town, Sant’Angelo in Colle, for lunch.

From the edge of the centuries-old hilltop town, the Italian countryside was laid out before us like a verdant patchwork quilt stitched together by dirt roads. We walked up to the main piazza, where one lonely child was walking around with a soccer ball as if certain there must be another child nearby who wanted to play. Farther on a man in an apron yelled something very loud at the window of an ancient building. The last time there was a census here, in 2011, the population was 204.

There were 10 of us for lunch: my husband, his parents, our children, the sisters Padovani, Margherita’s husband, John, and their infant daughter. We had pushed together a few tables on the terrace of Il Pozzo, a small trattoria serving classic Tuscan food. Under a canopy of white umbrellas, late summer sunlight poured in.

“Here wine is food: It’s our culture, our history,” Francesca said. “The wine has always been made by the farmers, not people who thought of themselves as winemakers. It is nothing but grape juice.”

“As it should be,” her sister said, finishing the thought.

The waiter laid out platters of warm, crisp fiori di zucca and insalata caprese, while Francesca filled our glasses with Fonterenza Rosso di Montalcino. (The proprietors of the restaurant hardly seemed to mind that Francesca had brought her own bottles.)

“The big vineyards make wine that always tastes the same,” Francesca said. “That’s not wine. Wine is about finding the beauty of the vintage, finding its personality: 2014 was a cold, difficult vintage; 2015 was the opposite — full and ripe and feminine. It should always tell a story.”

A short while later, the waiter placed bowls of pici al ragù and pici all’aglione in front of us, and Francesca stood to pour the Fonterenza Brunello di Montalcino around the table. Slow, heavy church bells reminded us it was midday, and gradually the sky clouded over. The landscape grew darker and a small stream of sunlight beamed directly onto a field of haystacks in the distance like a laser. The gods were playing favorites.

Instantly, the farmers knew what the rest of us did not.

“Grab your things — it’s going to pour,” Margherita said, wrapping her baby in a blanket and getting up from the table.

A second later, it was biblical, pelting the umbrellas like punishment. Rivers of rainwater gushed down the street. We all ran inside for cover (and caffe macchiati) — all but my children, who ran directly into the piazza, which had been transformed into a makeshift Tuscan water park.

I watched them jumping in puddles, arms outstretched, willing more rain to fall. Margherita stood next to me, shifting her infant daughter to her shoulder. I asked her if it was difficult to be a woman in her industry.

“People didn’t think we could do it,” she said. “And we didn’t know much. We planted half a hectare of cabernet sauvignon. That didn’t work. And if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t have broken so much machinery. But we believed we were doing the right thing.”

Theirs is a romantic undertaking. These young farmers with their tanned skin and leather bracelets are living a kind of bohemian utopia: Make beautiful wine using only the tools Mother Earth provides. Let the moon and the stars be your guide. Think small and waste nothing. Listen to music and read Goethe. And when winter comes, bury your secrets in the soil.

“The biggest misconception is that this is witchcraft. It is not witchcraft,” Mr. de Prato had said to me, smiling for a moment. “Well, maybe a little.”

En Toscane, les vigneronsont failli tomber de leur chaise quand ils ont entendu parler du vignoble de Francesco Illy. Mais, pour le petit-fils du fondateur de la célèbre marque de café éponyme, ce n’était pas une idée si folle que ça. Bienvenue à Montalcino.

Sur le flanc sud de la petite ville de Montalcino, au cœur de la Toscane, se trouve un vignoble unique en son genre. Nulle part ailleurs on ne trouve une parcelle présentant une telle densité de plants. Cette idée a germé dans l’esprit de Francesco Illy (63 ans), petit-fils du fondateur de la marque illycaffè (1933), célèbre dans le monde entier. Francesco, qui a grandi à Trieste et travaille pour le groupe familial en Suisse, a acheté le domaine Podere Le Ripi en 1998. Cet amoureux de la Toscane recherchait une propriété quand il trouva un domaine de 54 ha, mais, à son grand étonnement, il n’y avait pas un seul pied de vigne. «Cela me semblait ridicule», commente le viticulteur. Ni une, ni deux: un vignoble est planté pour faire du vin à vendre en vrac. «Mais Francesco ne fait pas les choses à moitié», ajoute son œnologue, Sebastian Nasello. «Il a des projets qui, à première vue, paraissent utopiques. Pourtant, ils deviennent réalité.» Sebastian Nasello est un jeune œnologue et le CEO de Podere Le Ripi. Il baigne dans l’univers du vin depuis toujours et a fait ses armes dans le Chianti Classico, le Trentino ...
«Aujourd’hui, ma vie, c’est le Brunello di Montalcino», déclare-t-il. Son premier job en tant qu’œnologue, il l’a exercé chez San Filippo, à Montalcino. «J’étais heureux de rencontrer un propriétaire qui me fasse confiance. J’étais encore jeune, mais ça m’a permis de bien connaître le sangiovese et de découvrir les secrets des vins de Brunello.» En 2012, quand Francesco Illy lui demande de venir travailler à Podere Le Ripi, Nasello n’a que 24 ans. «Un an à peine après mes débuts en tant qu’œnologue, Francesco m’a confié la responsabilité du domaine, y compris l’administration et les ventes. Et maintenant, je suis CEO!C’est tout Francesco! S’il croit en vous, il n’hésite pas.»
Vignoble bonsaï Ce passionné dirige une équipe de huit personnes. «Nous faisons tout nous-mêmes, nous n’avons pas de consultant. Juste avant mon arrivée, Francesco a décidé de passer à l’agriculture biologique. C’était en 2009. La conversion en biodynamie a été faite en 2010. À Montalcino, sur une trentaine de collègues, nous ne sommes que cinq à le faire. Sur ses 12 ha de vignobles, Podere Le Ripi ne produit

que 3.000 bouteilles environ par ha, alors qu’à Montalcino la moyenne est de 6.000 pour la même superficie. Nous sommes très stricts dans la sélection des raisins. La production totale du domaine est d’environ 30.000 bouteilles par an.» Un des vignobles du Ripi est très particulier. Dans les bons vignobles, on remarque parfois que les pieds de vigne sont plantés plus près les uns des autres qu’ailleurs. La densité à l’hectare augmente, ce qui oblige les plantes à développer leur racines pour atteindre les ressources des sols enfouies plus profondément. Pour cela, elles doivent passer au travers des différentes strates, ce qui les enrichit. Francesco Illy avait entendu parler de ce phénomène et de la technique afférente lors d’une visite en Bourgogne où, sur un vignoble traditionnel, on plante environ 5.000 à 6.000 pieds à l’ha. Mais notre audacieux Italien a planté 62.500 (!) pieds à l’ha. Il qualifie ce projet de ‘vignoble bonsaï’. «Les vignes sont plantées à environ 40 cm d’écart. Le vignoble fait exactement 1 ha. Nous avons tout planté en carrés pour que les pieds
soient accessibles», explique-t-il. Au début, son œnologue était un peu inquiet, mais enthousiaste: «Nous ne savions absolument pas ce que l’idée de Francesco allait donner une fois en bouteille. Nous devions apprendre à comprendre le fonctionnement de ce type de vignoble. En plus, il n’y en avait encore jamais eu nulle part! L’entretien est extrêmement complexe parce que l’on ne peut pas passer entre les vignes. La taille, le désherbage, tout cela nécessite une approche radicalement différente.»
Une cave comme un panthéon Ce vignoble bonsaï n’est pas la première idée originale d’Illy. En 2005, il avait déjà concrétisé un autre projet: construire une cave permettant de mieux élaborer le vin et de recevoir des visiteurs. «Comme le béton est incompatible avec notre approche bio dynamique, ma cave est en briques cuites à la main, il y en a 750.000 en tout!» Dans sa cave, il n’y a pas d’inox non plus: le vin est élevé en foudres et barriques de chêne français. Il est refroidi naturellement: «Et nous ne travaillons qu’en utilisant la force de gravité. Le vin n’est jamais pompé vers le haut.» La cave est construite selon les principes du nombre d’or et a la forme d’un escargot. «C’était moins facile que nous ne le pensions», admet Illy. «Je voulais aussi y retrouver un peu de l’âme du Panthéon de Rome.» Illy débouche une bouteille de Podere Le Ripi Bonsai 2011, un sangiovese. En fonction
du millésime, seulement 600 à 900 bouteilles de ce vin sont produites chaque année, dont 12 (!) sont réservées pour la Belgique. «Oui, c’est dommage que nous en ayons aussi peu», avoue Sebastian Nasello. «La plupart disparaissent dans les caves des collectionneurs et ne seront jamais bues.» Mais, si c’est le cas, quel bonheur!