Podere Poggio Scalette

Podere Poggio Scalette’s History and Philosophy

One of the few considerations on Tuscan wines that are universally shared and that no one feels the slightest need to contest is that which affirms the fundamental and decisive role of wine consultants both in qualitative growth and in the expansion of the number of producers.

The reason is quite simple: fifty years ago the production was almost exclusively in the hands of the noble or wealthy bourgeois families who owned the land, and the winemaking was delegated to the peasants who managed the farm, men who had some practical experience in agriculture , which also extended to the production of olive oil, cultivation of wheat fields, cattle breeding, sheep grazing, coal production and many other activities. But when Italian wine had to face markets – both international and national – which required very precise quality standards, it became immediately evident that this type of empirical approach was no longer sufficient. And the trained winemakers who worked mainly for the large commercial houses in the region were too few,

The gap was filled by the arrival of talented, energetic and ambitious consultants who quickly became key figures that allowed a huge leap in quality and visibility of the wines. And there was no more important key figure than Vittorio Fiore , who moved to Tuscany after a detention as president of the association of Italian winemakers, and was already considered as a sort of deux ex machina since the mid-1980s. List the number of wineries that he launched contributing to success would be a waste of space and time, as would a list of the new areas of the region where his work has shown that producing quality wine, which until then had never been produced , it was simply a matter of skill and talent. For 25 years, however, he also managed his own company, a small and magical hillside estate in Greve in Chianti.

The wines of Podere Poggio Scalette

And its wines – Il Carbonaione, Capogatto and, recently, the Chianti Classico – have shown that winemaking is both an art and a science, much more than the consolidated traditions of the past that have never been able to bottle the results of this level of excellence.