In 1988, the price of a nice two-bedroom holiday flat on the Amalfi Coast got you a whole estate in Chianti Classico. For Gabriele Buondonno, looking for exciting places to make wine, it was a logical decision: he sold up. Starting with a large house and a modest four hectares of vines, he began producing wine in 1989, in 1990 becoming one of only three organic growers in the Classico region. Over the years he began to acquire more vineyards, finally achieving his current size of 15 hectares. They are planted in a river valley running roughly north south, with cool breezes making them several degrees colder than other vineyards nearby, and a large proportion – 6 hectares – face directly north, shielding them from too much sun. These two factors are major contributions to the freshness in the wines, particularly important in times of climate change, and Gabriele maintains that the big day/night temperature differences increase the presence of polyphenols (responsible for complexity and flavour) in the wines.
At the beginning he was a busy man. His wife, an agriculture professor at the university of Naples, only came home at weekends, leaving their three children in his care. This forced him to take a non-interventionist approach, with no time to do
anything but the bare minimum in the cantina – two pump-overs a day during fermentation rather than three, and waiting for malolactic fermentation to start rather than inducing it, contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy. The wines benefited – the vineyard spoke, rather than the winemaker, an approach that characterises the wines to this day. They are real, humming with energy, not manipulated or manufactured, but perfectly reflecting their origins.
Since 2022 he has been joined by his son.