Ficomontanino "Bulgarelli" Rosso, Tuscany, Italy 2022

FROM ROSENTHAL:

THE WINE: 100% Sangiovese. Maria Sole’s workhorse (pun intended) wine, “Bulgarelli”—named after her grandfather’s prized stallion—is pure Sangiovese from 20to 30-year-old vines planted in the sandy clay soils of the farm’s main three parcels: Ficomontano, Melogranino, and Campo Cavalli. Fermented naturally, with a two-week maceration, the wine spends the better part of a year in a combination of cement and steel vats, bottled without fining or filtration. This wine pulls in multiple directions; it is both fresh and deep, both spicy and politely earthy, and its dark red fruits soar high, unfettered by cellar manipulations. The ever-versatile Sangiovese finds a new and lovely register here.

THE PRODUCER: Maria Sole's farm is called Ficomontanino (roughly, "Little Fig Mountain"), a property her grandfather acquired in the 1960s as a place to produce olive oil and breed horses. He planted the first vines here almost 40 years ago, making wine as a hobby, and while Maria Sole's father ramped up production a bit, his approach was more conventional, informed by then-current trends toward power and color. Having studied at Slow Food's University of Culinary Arts at Pollenzo, Maria Sole was inspired by the teachings of Rudolf Steiner and Masanobu Fukuoka to reimagine her family's vineyards as part of a larger ecosystem, and when she gained responsibility for them in 2014, she set about establishing a natural equilibrium on the property, incorporating biodynamic preparations, allowing vegetation to grow freely, and relying on only bare traces of copper-sulfate to treat her vineyards.

She has gradually been refining her approach in the cellar as well, working toward ever more expressiveness via ever fewer interventions. Maria Sole's mother is from Sardinia, and she was inspired to drastically alter her approach to temperature control, sulfur, and other such safeguards by the bold, proudly natural wines of Tenute Dettori (located near to her mother's birth home), as well as by numerous examples from Piedmont, where she worked after school for a number of years. Her cellar sidekick Fabio, originally from the Valtellina, worked at the legendary Ar.Pe.Pe estate, and both he and Maria Sole bring a certain appreciation of reined-in, precise wildness to the overarching aesthetic of Ficomontanino's wines.