2022 Querciabella Chianti Classico

Product Description

Querciabella, meaning “beautiful oak”, was born of one man’s love of great wine. In 1974 Giuseppe “Pepito” Castiglioni, a Milanese industrialist and lifelong collector, bought a single hectare of vines at Ruffoli, high on the hillside above Greve in Chianti. His ambition was bold: to make wines in Tuscany that could stand alongside the finest Bordeaux and Burgundies in his own cellar. With the legendary oenologist Giacomo Tachis, a long-time friend, later joining as consultant, Querciabella quickly became one of the leading names in Chianti Classico’s modern renaissance and a pioneer of the Super Tuscan movement.

Under Giuseppe’s son, Sebastiano Cossia Castiglioni, that single hectare has grown to around 100 hectares, spread across the finest communes of Chianti Classico and the coastal Maremma. Sebastiano has also made Querciabella one of Italy’s most forward-thinking estates. Organic since 1988, it went fully biodynamic by 2000, and then went further than almost anyone in the world of wine by adopting an entirely plant-based form of biodynamics. No animal products are used anywhere, from vineyard to cellar, in pursuit of healthy, living soils and wines of absolute purity.

That philosophy shows in the glass. Querciabella’s wines are celebrated for their precision, freshness and finesse, rather than sheer power. The flagship Camartina, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Sangiovese, ranks among Tuscany’s most revered reds, while Batàr, the estate’s barrel-aged blend of Chardonnay and Pinot Blanc, has been called Tuscany’s “most complex and ambitious white wine” by the Financial Times. With more than fifty vintages now behind it, Querciabella remains one of the region’s most admired and consistently brilliant estates.

The Querciabella Chianti Classico has been the heart of the estate since its very first vintage. Made entirely from Sangiovese, it draws on high-altitude vineyards in three of the appellation’s finest communes, each adding its own voice. Greve brings vibrant, fresh fruit. Radda, with its galestro soils, lends darker fruit, lift and persistent tannins. Gaiole, on alberese limestone, adds riper fruit, density and bright acidity. Aged for around a year in fine-grained French barriques and tonneaux, with only a small proportion of new oak, it is a supremely elegant, pure-fruited expression of Chianti Classico, and a wonderful introduction to one of Tuscany’s great estates.