news & eventi
Woodbury Magazine mentioned us on their Spring 2018 Edition: "For a truly unique splurge, head to Podere le Ripi" !
02/03/2018
Check out the Full Article Here: https://issuu.com/woodburymagazine/docs/spring_2018/64
Podere le Ripi nel National Geographic Traveller Luxury Collection 2017
03/10/2017
In Montalcino in the heart of Tuscany, between
the Orcia Valley and dormant Amiata volcano,
sits Podere Le Ripi winery. Specialising in the
Sangiovese grapes used for the famous Brunello
and Rosso di Montalcino wines, a visit to Podere
Le Ripi reveals how traditional techniques paired
with modern knowledge work together to produce
their wines.
Situated less than two miles from the 12thcentury
Sant’Antimo Abbey, Podere Le Ripi
occupies 33 acres from a hilltop vantage point.
Owner Francesco Illy bought the land from a
Sardinian shepherd in 1997; back then, there
wasn’t a single vine, just fields of flowers and
herbs, which still flourish today.
Not a single chemical has ever been sprayed,
and in 2010, Podere Le Ripi committed to
biodynamic farming by enriching the soil with
micorrizas, a mix of insects, worms and roots. This
has promoted a highly complex structure and
aroma spectrum of the wine, resulting in the
winery being the third in Montalcino to achieve
organic and biodynamic certification.
The Podere Le Ripi’s Bonsai vineyard is
renowned. Legend has it that Illy was once told by
an old Burgundy winemaker that a vineyard
makes a good wine only after 35-40 years. He had
no intention of waiting until he was 90 to sip his
great wine, so he asked himself what would
happen if he planted more vines to force
competition between their roots?
Bravely, he planted 62,000 vines just 40cm
apart. The sturdy plants were compelled to find
soil, water and nutrition at greater depths, and
after only four years, their roots had grown to the
astonishing depth of 10ft. This strategy is the key
to the winery’s best wine. First, the grapes are
fermented in oak vats, then refined in big oak
barrels for up to five years, before being bottled
and aged. The wine is never exported.
The vineyard offers various tours and tastings
that can be booked online, including a guided
cellar visit. An exclusive lunch or dinner — typical
Tuscan cuisine of salami, ham, cheeses and pastas
— is served, paired with Podere Le Ripi’s finest
wines on a sunny terrace with stunning views.
NEED TO KNOW
KEY FACILITIES
• Wine cellar
• Wine tours and tastings
• Helicopter landing pad
• Terrace
GET IN TOUCH
podereleripi.it
T: 0039 0577835641
E (information): info@podereleripi.it
E (bookings): visite@podereleripi.it
Don’t miss // Taste the Bonsai wine, a one-of-a-kind viticultural speciality coming from the highest density vineyard in the world.
18. natgeotraveller.co.uk/thecollection
The Family Coffee Dynasty That’s Now Making Some of Italy’s Best Wine
17/07/2017
A third-generation member of the Illy family (of the famous Illycaffè empire) invented the 'dense' vineyard and now produces some of the most highly-coveted wine in Tuscany.
By Adam Lague - Luxury Retreats
The Family Coffee Dynasty That’s Now Making Some of Italy’s Best Wine
A third-generation member of the Illy family (of the famous Illycaffè empire) invented the 'dense' vineyard—and now produces some of the most highly-coveted wine in Tuscany.
Francesco Illy is accomplished, just like the rest of his family. He is part of the third generation of Illys responsible for building a coffee empire started by his grandfather – the original Francesco Illy – in 1933. In 1935, the first Francesco patented the espresso. In the sixties, his son Ernesto invented electronic selection, a system used in all the world’s coffee-growing countries to eliminate defective cherries. In the 1980s, Ernesto’s son Riccardo reinvented illy’s 250g ground coffee tin. And in the 1990s, Ernesto’s brother Francesco (of the third generation) created the first colorful designer home-use espresso machine. Each member of the family has made his or her mark on the company. But for Francesco Illy of present-day, his work outside the family business may be his most significant. After all, he has created the densest vineyard in the world. Thankfully, private vineyard tours and wine tastings mean you can experience it all for yourself.
The World’s Densest Vineyard
Each of Podere le Ripi’s four wines has its own vineyard, soil, density, and quality. Bonsai, a deep ruby red Rosso Di Montalcino, is the most expensive, and it is named as such because of the extreme proximity of its vines. It is the product of a revolutionary technique invented by Illy himself.
In 1997, after a 10-year search, Illy finally bought a home on 55 hectares of land in Montalcino, a Tuscan hill town known for its Brunello wine. The land, known as Podere le Ripi, was flipped to Illy from a selling shepherd, and its soil was completely free of grape vines. Illy was a wine consumer and, prior to moving there, a customer of several wine producers in Montalcino. But he was no winemaker and at first, making wine was not even his intention.
After two years of living on his vast estate with enough room to do about whatever he pleased, he decided he wanted to make his own wine. He started to study and he fell in love with wine production. Winemakers told Illy he would have no luck making a great wine with vines younger than 35 years old. In a business that many are born into, passed down across generation after generation, Francesco Illy was trying to break into the industry at 50 years old. By popular logic, Illy would be able to take his first sip of his own wine around age 90. No, thank you, he said.
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.”
Not only is Bonsai dense, it is the densest vineyard in the world, a fact Illy is proud of considering how absurd his ideas seemed to some, and how they worked out. “By having density, we can increase the competition between the vines. Because they are close and they can’t grow in the top of the surface, they have to dig,” Nasello explains.
Another advantage of Illy’s deep-rooted vines is the ability to maintain humidity. Where surface-level roots are prone to going dry with lack of humid weather, roots that penetrate three meters deep are able to find water even during a dry spell.
Illy recalls, “Everybody said I was crazy and I said, ‘I don’t care. I’ll try, I’ll see what happens.’ When you put them so narrow, one to the other, either they go down with the roots or they die. And they went down. This has been working very well.”
Ellen Rothschild is part owner of a paperless office company based out of New York and Massachusetts. Her family became hooked on wine tours during a 2016 trip to Argentina and Chile. Rothschild and her daughter both gravitate toward Italian wines, while she admits her husband prefers French wines. Staying at Arianna villa in Tuscany’s Chianti Area in June 2017, her personal vacation concierge set her and her family up with a first-time visit to Podere le Ripi. She describes the vineyard as having “a view that you just can’t beat,” and one that she can recreate every time she sips one of Illy’s wines.
The Harmonious Cellar
Podere le Ripi sits next door to Mastrojanni, a historic Brunello estate more than two decades old. (The Illy family would go on to buy the estate in 2008.) In 1997, when Illy moved in, the family had never produced wine, but they had six decades of beverage experience behind them. The original Francesco Illy, grandfather of this Francesco Illy, in 1933 founded the world-renown Italian coffee roasting company illy, specializing in espresso.
The family-owned holding company Gruppo illy SpA would later use a series of acquisitions to extend its branches: along with coffee, they sell jams and marron glacé, or candied chestnuts (Agrimontana, December 2005); chocolate (Domori, 2006); and tea (Dammann Frères, 2007). The group’s venture into wine, led by Francesco’s younger brother Riccardo, of Mastrojanni in September 2008 meant each Illy generation had introduced a beverage to the company. Years earlier though, Francesco had already personally begun to experiment with wine. To this day, he is the sole owner of Podere le Ripi and his family has little to do with it.
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.”
Il Vino
Podere le Ripi produces and sells 35,000 bottles a year. Despite being the world’s densest, it is a relatively small vineyard that sells primarily to restaurants. His four cornerstone wines are Amore e Follia, Amore e Magia, Lupi e Sirene, and Bonsai, the first of which being a Syrah wine, coming from a dark-skinned grape variety found around the world. The other three are 100% Sangiovese, a red Italian wine grape variety unique to central Italy. Producing wine with an attachment to the region is important to Nasello, who moved away from his hometown of Siena in 2008 to get involved in what he believes is the best wine product in Italy, in Montalcino.
“There are different ways to produce wine, but in Montalcino if you want to create a wine with personality, the process is based on feeling—the feeling of the team, the feeling of the vineyard, the feeling of the land,” Nasello tells me. “I’m not interested in having a wine that is covered by the identity of the winemaker. I’m more interested in having a wine that people can drink and say ‘that’s a great Brunello from the south side of the hill,’ and can recognize the taste of our wine.”
Illy is a naturalist who believes in enriching; his winery has always been organic but in 2010 he decided to begin following biodynamic procedures, a holistic, ecological, and ethical approach to winemaking. “Taking away poison from the soil was one thing, but how do you make the soil rich?” he asks. Now, he says, his plants are better, his grapes are better, and his wines are better.
So is this the best wine in Montalcino? Illy pauses, before concluding: “No.” He ponders a few more seconds, then explains: “I think it’s a very, very good wine but I don’t have the arrogance to say I’m the best. I think I am with the best.”
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.
Francesco Illy never intended to make wine, sell it, guide tours of his vineyard and cellar, and have people travel specifically to taste it. But he did. And he did it in a way nobody believed he could, while creating the world’s densest vineyard. He believes his is among the best wines in the region, and though he won’t lose sleep over not yet being the best, he won’t stop anytime soon.
“My goal is to increase my quality and the excellence of the things I’m doing as far as I can,” says Illy. “This is the goal. If this is going to bring me to make the best wine in Montalcino, I don’t even care. For me, what’s important is that it’s good. That I reach something that I really like.”
"Podere Le Ripi: a coffee baron moves to Montalcino" by Justin Keay, The Buyer
04/03/2017
So what makes a coffee baron, Francesco Illy – heir to the Trieste coffee empire – want to set up in Montalcino, a region not known for welcoming new winemakers with open arms? The Buyer sits down with Illy and gets the full story as well as taste his extraordinary wines.
Tasting the full range of Podere Le Ripi wines including a vertical of Lupe e Sirene Brunello Reservas, and the top Bonsai wine that Francesco Illy claims comes from the world’s smallest vines.
Francesco Illy
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.
Justin Keay gets the lowdown
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.
Podere Le Ripi
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.
Written by: Justin Keay
Barolo Brunello 25-26 Marzo 2017
06/02/2017
Barolo Brunello 2017 - Spring Edition
Lugano - CH
Dopo le precedenti edizioni italiane, i piu' prestigiosi nomi dell’enologia italiana tornano ad incontrarsi in due giorni di degustazioni di altissimo profilo.
25 e 26 marzo 2017 - Lugano (CH)
Una degustazione unica ormai divenuta un evento con più appuntamenti annuali
arricchito di iniziative ed incontri legati al mondo
del Barolo e del Brunello di Montalcino, si trasferisce all'estero in attesa della
edizione italiana di novembre 2017
40 produttori di Barolo e Brunello di Montalcino si incontrano a Lugano al LAC - Lugano Arte e Cultura
BAROLO
Agricola Gian Piero Marrone, Az. Agr. Giuseppe Mascarello e Figlio, Boglietti Enzo,
Burzi Alberto, Cavallotto, Diego Conterno, Dosio, Elvio Cogno, Ettore Germano, Fratelli Alessandria,
Giacomo Borgogno & Figli, Gianfranco Alessandria, Le Strette, Marengo Mario, Pelassa,
Principiano Ferdinando, Rivetto dal 1902, Scarzello Giorgio & Figli, Vajra, Vietti.
BRUNELLO DI MONTALCINO
Banfi, Canalicchio di Sopra, Caprili, Casanova di Neri, Cava d'Onice,
Col d'Orcia, Ferrero Claudia, Fuligni, Il Marroneto, La Mannella,
Mastrojanni, Pietroso, Podere Le Ripi, Poggio di Sotto, Sanlorenzo,
Talenti, Tenuta Il Poggione, Uccelliera.