The Estate That Walked Away From the Rules

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A Love Italy feature — Avignonesi, Montepulciano

In 1990, Avignonesi made a Vin Santo that took twenty-five years to sell.

Not because no one wanted it. Because the wine wasn’t ready until 2015.

That single fact tells you almost everything you need to know about what it means to make wine at Avignonesi, the estate that sits on the ridge above Montepulciano, looking out over a valley where the Chiana winds south toward Arezzo and the Orcia turns west toward the sea. The estate that decided, at some point in its modern history, that the rules governing serious wine — the ones written by the market, by the critics, by the economics of holding inventory for a quarter century — didn’t apply here.

The Town on the Ridge

Montepulciano is one of those Tuscan hill towns that seems to exist specifically to make visitors feel that they have found the real thing. The main street climbs from the lower town to the Piazza Grande at the summit through a sequence of Renaissance palaces, medieval towers, and churches that have been accumulating here since the Etruscans understood that this particular ridge offered the best sight lines in the Chiana valley. The wine that bears the town’s name — Vino Nobile di Montepulciano — is made from Sangiovese, known here as Prugnolo Gentile, and has been produced in these hills since at least the eighth century.

Avignonesi arrived in Montepulciano in the sixteenth century, when a Flemish merchant named Virgilio Avignonesi established himself in the palazzo that still bears the family name on the main street. The wine estate as it exists today took its modern shape in the 1970s and 1980s, when the brothers Ettore and Alberto Falvo transformed it into one of the reference producers of Vino Nobile and, more unexpectedly, into the custodians of the most extraordinary Vin Santo programme in Italy.

In 2009, the Belgian entrepreneur Virginie Saverys bought the estate. She was not a winemaker. She had never grown vines. What she did, which changed everything that came after, was convert all 170 hectares of Avignonesi’s vineyards to biodynamic farming and then wait.

Biodynamics is not a shortcut. It is the opposite of a shortcut. It requires the farmer to understand the soil as a living system — one that responds to the moon’s cycle, to the preparation of specific herbal composts, to the rhythm of the farm rather than the calendar of the market. It takes years before the soil shows what it is capable of when it is treated this way. Virginie Saverys started in 2009. By 2015 Avignonesi had achieved full Demeter biodynamic certification — the first estate of its size in Tuscany to do so.

The wines that have come since are the argument for what she did.

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