Soft, rolling hills that look as though they were painted. Cypress trees dotted everywhere. Hill-top towns in expanses of endless countryside.
Vineyards, wine cellars and that unmistakable scent of Tuscany. It’s no surprise, then, that we are in one of the most spectacularly beautiful parts of the world.
In the Orcia Valley and in Chianti everything speaks of wine. And, in some places, too, there’s talk of its relationship with art.

WOMEN, WINE AND ART IN MONTALCINO
CASATO PRIME DONNE

This is a story about a family that stretches back six centuries. It’s about Donatella Cinelli Colombini and is full of great people, great passions, and great wine. A story that has culminated in the creation of two wineries in the heart of Tuscany – the Fattoria del Colle, in the D’Orcia DOC and Casato Prime Donne terroirs.

The terroirs of the vineyard have belonged to the Donatella family since the Middle Ages. The Sozzini’s or Socini’s were her paternal ancestors who founded the Fattoria del Colle. In the Sixteenth century, the administration of the lands and the house passed into the hands of some members of the family who were heretics and who had earnt a certain degree of distinction during the Protestant Reformation. They were thence promptly excommunicated and so lost all their worldly possessions. However, towards the end of the Sixteenth century the land passed once again into the hands of the (maternal) ancestors of Donatella, the Cinelli Colombini family. The property went from father to son from that very moment onwards before arriving, in modern times, at the more recent pattern of passing from mother to daughter.

Casato Prime Donne is in Montalcino. It is a place which is exceedingly difficult not to admire. It possesses a strong identity and is a project that has been created and constructed solely by women. The first winery in Italy with a staff that is 100% made up of the fairer sex. This is where those marvellous bottles of Rosso and Brunello di Montalcino come from. These are elegant wines, a consonance of red, a long-lasting wine that is produced in an environment where art and wine are fused together in utter harmony.

Installations rise up around the winery and the vineyards; works undertaken by Sienese and Tuscan contemporary artists which appear to be conversing with the surrounding countryside. These works are accompanied by written dedications to Montalcino, penned by the winners of the Premio Casato Prime Donne: an award for women only, created by Donatella in order to enhance and valorise the works of women who write, who take photographs and who relate the stories of this part of Tuscany and its wines….and its women.
And, this is not the whole picture, either. The wine cellar (or bottaia in Montalcino) is full of barrels or tonneaux and is the place where the Brunello ages for at least two years. It is decorated with frescoes which reveal the secrets and the legends of the surrounding area. The tinaia (or the room where the wine is fermented) is the actual production area where the harvested grapes are transformed into wine inside little vats made of plain cement. It is a sort of stage upon which both real and painted images of Montalcino are shown along with sound and music.

LABELS, ART ON BOTTLES
NITTARDI

“Wine is more than an agricultural product. Inside each and every bottle, and in the very wine itself, you can taste the land it comes from. You can perceive the strength of who has produced it and the story of who has shaped it. In my opinion, wine is Culture with a capital C, much the same as art or music or poetry,” claims Léon Femfert, heir to the Canali-Femfert family, owners since 1981 of Nittardi, a little Tuscan wine-making jewel right in the heart of the Chianti Classico area.

The estate had originally been a defence tower, known as Nectar Dei and in the Sixteenth century it was the property of the eternally well-known Michelangelo Buonarroti who, grappling with the almighty effort of painting the Sistine Chapel in Rome, implored – it is said – his nephew to send him some demijohns of wine to set before Pope Paul III as a most “genuine gift.”

The top wines at Nittardi are the Nectar Dei and the Ad Astra. The first one is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Petit Verdot, Merlot and Syrah, masterfully bound together by the reddest of hues, with claret-coloured undertones, aromatic notes upon the nose and lengthy persistence on the palate. In much the same way that Michelangelo had sent his bottles to the Pope of the time, so did the Femfert family – in order to continue the tradition – pay tribute to Pope Benedict XVI.
The name of Ad Astra is inspired by the Latin proverb: Per Aspera Ad Astra — “Our Aspirations Take Us To The Stars,” – indicative of the fact that to obtain this particular wine heightened dedication and effort in the vineyard is required. A complex wine, ruby-red in colour, on the nose there’s a red fruit bouquet and a trace of liquorice and, on the palate, it demonstrates all of its complexity.
The Femfert family has been weaving this relationship between wine, art and culture thanks to the creation of a collection of paintings, drawings and sculpture and thanks, too, to an interesting project dedicated to the labels on the wine bottles.

Every year, an artist of international fame creates for one of their most important wines – the Chianti Classico Casanuova Vigna Doghessa – the label and the tissue paper in which the classic Bordeaux wine bottle is wrapped, thus transforming it into a much sought-after collection piece. From the first ones, with those poetic, bucolic images and visions, dreamt up by Bruno Bruni for the 1981 vintage to the sheer creative talent of that great architect, Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1989). In later years, it would be the turn of the statuesque contours of Igor Mitoraj (1997), the visual poetry of Yoko Ono (2005), the synthetic painting of Mimmo Paladino (2006) and, lastly, the agitated squiggles of Dario Fo (2010).

The latest vintage, from 2019, has been designed by Fabrizio Plessi, one of the world’s pioneers of video art. He has created L’oro di Venezia (“The Gold of Venice”) and The Golden Age, the first works developed entirely digitally for the wine house’s collection, destined for both the label and the tissue paper.

TENUTA CASENUOVE

Philippe Austruy is a philanthropist, a collector and a wine producer and he possesses several vineyards in France, Portugal and Italy. He has always cultivated a desire to bring back to renewed life places for the growing of wine and hidden estates.
The Tenuta Casenuove, right in the heart of the Chianti Classico area, in Panzano in Chianti, was acquired by Philippe Austruy in 2015. From 2016 to 2018 the vineyard underwent two periods of restoration thanks to the careful guidance of Alessandro Fonseca. During the first period of restoration, two hectares of Sangiovese (the main grape variety of the estate) were set out as well as a hectare and a half of Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon. In the second period, minor autochthonous grape varieties were planted such as the Canaiolo, Colorino and Ciliegiolo varieties.
The enthusiasm of the young team that is working day in and day out at the Tenuta Casenuove, along with the far-sightedness of Philippe Austruy, is the right mix that enables the estate to undertake such ambitious projects that are aimed at innovating and modernising the wine sector. Respect for the wine-producing area and for its products is held particularly dear to both the property as well as to the staff who work upon the estate. The current tendency towards organic production is the direct consequence of this. Today, the estate produces four labels: Chianti Classico, Chianti Classico Riserva, IGT Toscano, and Ziik, the sparkling rosé which is 100% Sangiovese.

Art, as always, the narrative thread connecting all Monsieur Austruy’s projects, shadows his passion for wine. Stemming from a fortunate encounter of like spirits and future visions with Lorenzo Fiaschi, co-founder of the Galleria Continua, a partnership has been created with the Tenuta Casenuove as the major player of a new project which embraces wine and contemporary art: “Le Radici dell’Arte” – the Roots of Art. Every year an artist savours and internalises the voice of the Tenuta Casenuove and creates a specific on-site work for it. Permanent installations are realised that are in harmony with – and conversing with – the landscape and the people who shape this very landscape.

Apart from the “Radici dell’Arte”, the Tenuta Casenuove and the Galleria Continua have also developed two further areas of connection between art and wine: The “Sala delle Volte”, inside the estate buildings, a large room in which temporary exhibitions will be set up and, in the centre of Panzano in Chianti, the multi-purpose area called the “Vino dell’Arte” – the Wine of Art, where people will be able to enjoy tastings of the wines of the Tenuta Casenuove as well as visit the art gallery. The area has been decorated with a permanent mural installation by Loris Cecchini who also held a temporary exhibition in the same area entitled Waterbones, in 2020. Loris Cecchini is a multi-disciplinary artist – possessed of an unquenchable innate curiosity – who approaches the concept of spatiality from an innovative and scientific angle. Through biology, technology and mechanics the artist seeks to create a bridge that might unite poetic narrative and industrial production.

Other artists who have inaugurated a series of artistic collaborations with the Galleria Continua are Pascale Marthine Tayou and Sun Yuan & Peng Yu.

For the Tenuta Casenuove, Tayou has created the permanent installation entitled “I Geni di Casenuove” – The Geniuses of Casenuove (2020). The artist dedicated these structures in crystal to the women and men who are the soul, every single day, behind -and within – the wine-producing estate. In Tayou’s mind’s eye, they are the “poets who have inhabited, who inhabit and who will always inhabit the Tenuta Casenuove.”

Sun Yuan & Peng Yu created “Teenager Teenager”, a temporary installation for the Tenuta Casenuove, in 2020. The exhibition was held until 2021 and was in collaboration with the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo to invite people to reflect upon the confines of communication and on general conflict as well as reflect upon the safeguarding of what we already have.

The last weekend of March 2022, the “Weekend of Art in Tuscany”, saw the inauguration of several exhibitions in the region. The exhibition in San Gimignano, at the Galleria Continua,“Distancia interna” by Alejandro Campins and “Tectonic Shift – Spostamento Tettonico” by Moataz Nasr; at the Tenuta Casenuove, the exhibition, “La casa del Salto” by Osvaldo González, a Cuban artist who works in Havana and who was inspired by a typical 1920’s museum layout in Havana that had been a former abandoned hotel before becoming a museum was so ideal for Orlando! With sixteen sheets of plexiglass, González reproduced the setting of an internal stairway of a building wrapped within a dramatic atmosphere of light and shade, so all of its magnificence would be displayed and transmitted to the spectators.
Furthermore, in the “Vino dell’Arte” – Wine of Art in Panzano, works by Leandro Erlich and Serse have been put on display in the exhibition, “Vedere a differenti distanze” – Seeing at Different Distances. The two artists explore – so intensely and so profoundly – the relationship between Mankind and Nature. Natural phenomena are grasped in a transient moment and recorded by Serse in pencil drawings on paper and by Erlich in ceramic engravings on glass.