Chiara Condello 'Predappio' Romagna Sangiovese Predappio DOC 2021

Born into a winemaking family in Predappio, in the northern Italian region of Romagna, the forever fastidious Chiara Condello thought her future lay elsewhere. Studying economics in Milan, she was keen on joining a consulting firm and becoming a full-on business lady. Upon graduating in 2012, however, she decided to return home for the summer, got roped into harvest and realized she had been just plain wrong: It was impossible to tear herself away from the vineyards. Three years later, she heard a neighbor was planning to rip out their old vines and took it as a sign to forge out on her own. She purchased the four parcels—about 4.8 hectares worth of sangiovese, between 150 and 350 meters above sea level, in a mix of clay-limestone, red clay and spungone soils—plus the surrounding woodlands, and got to work, nourishing cover crops, relying mostly on the occasional application of horse manure, and using scant amounts of sulphur and copper for pest control. “Before being a good winemaker,” she says, “it’s important to have healthy and balanced vineyards. That’s why I follow the vineyards every day, with the goal of bringing in the cellar a healthy and mature grape that does not require any correction.” Today, she makes only two wines regularly, each fermented with native yeasts, very little temperature control and long maceration, moved via gravity and aged in Slavonian oak botti, and bottled unfined and unfiltered. Though this wine is meant to be her normale (entry level) bottling, it’s nothing short of a treasure, offering supple strawberry and cherry flavors balanced by a warming cedar quality and saline minerality. Certified Organic, Low-Intervention/Natural Wine.