Terre del Buontalenti Vermentino Ansonica 2025
£12.75
The wine
Light, pale straw. White flowers and ripe stone fruit on the nose, white peach with a touch of flint. The palate is lively and distinctly mineral, well balanced and fruit-driven, with golden apple and yellow peach edging towards the tropical.
Eighty per cent Vermentino with 20 per cent Ansonica, selected from vineyards along the southern Tuscan coast on sand and clay, Guyot-trained. Terre del Buontalenti is a collaboration bringing small growers together under Alberto Antonini, an alliance of talents aimed at a deliberate return to tradition in vineyard and cellar; the Tuscan soils of limestone, schist, granite and sandstone are what give these wines their juiciness and texture. Whole clusters were gently pressed and the juice settled naturally at 8°C, then fermented in temperature-controlled concrete at 18°C over 20 days with malolactic deliberately blocked to keep the acidity taut. The wine stayed on fine lees in concrete until bottling.
The producer
Terre del Buontalenti
View all Terre del Buontalenti winesTerre 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.
