Terre del Buontalenti

Terre del Buontalenti is a Tuscan collaboration that connects small grape growers under the guidance of the winemaker Alberto Antonini. The alliance aims at a conscious return to tradition in the vineyard and the cellar, and the wines are clean, pure and recognisable for their freshness.

The model matters. Tuscany is a region of very small holdings, and a grower with two hectares of good Sangiovese has no realistic route to market alone: no cellar worth the name, no bottling line, no buyer. Pooling that fruit under one winemaker gives access to parcels that would otherwise be sold anonymously into bulk, and gives the growers a reason to farm for quality rather than tonnage.

Bernardo Buontalenti, after whom the project is named, was a sixteenth-century Florentine architect, engineer and stage designer in the service of the Medici, and by tradition the inventor of gelato. Naming a growers' alliance after a Renaissance polymath is a fair statement of intent: several disciplines, one result. Antonini's style throughout is to protect acidity and avoid heavy extraction, which suits Sangiovese better than the international model that dominated Tuscany in the 1990s.