Vine Farmer Day 5: Human Scale Sangiovese
There is something quietly convincing about wines made at a fully human scale. And again, our friends at Vine Farmer know that better than most; it’s what they bring to the table, so to speak.
Andrea and Lucia farm just six hectares at San Biagio Vecchio in Romagna, with no herbicides, no systemic treatments, and no sense that the goal is to manufacture consistency. This is a tiny family operation built around observation, patience, and instinct.
Andrea actually arrived here sideways. He was studying law in Bologna when his uncle Giorgio, a wine merchant in Faenza, pointed him toward the estate in 2004. The first time he visited the cellar, he recognized the smell immediately. It reminded him of his grandfather’s cellar. He took that as a sign and never went back to law. He took over the winery from a retiring parish priest and winemaker of San Biagio who then gifted the property to Andrea in inheritance, along with decades of accumulated knowledge tied to this land.
Lucia’s path was equally unlikely. She had been working as a sommelier at Enoteca Picone in Palermo when a neighboring restaurant owner convinced her to return home to Romagna for one summer to run the restaurant next door to the estate. One summer turned permanent.
Their 2024 PorcaLoca is one of the most distinctive expressions of Romagna Sangiovese I have tasted this year. Romagna itself is having a real moment right now, due in no small part to producers like Chiara Condello helping reframe what Sangiovese can look like outside Tuscany. This is the ancestral home of the grape, and the cooler, wetter conditions here tend to produce wines with darker aromatic profiles, violet toned fruit, earth, and savory depth even at lower ripeness.
PorcaLoca was born almost accidentally. In 2014, heavy rains wiped out more than half the Sangiovese crop. The surviving fruit from the highest rows produced a wine with such unexpected elegance and tension that it permanently shifted the estate’s philosophy. They realized Sangiovese did not need extraction or weight to communicate seriousness.
This wine sees just four days of skin contact with no punch downs at all, yet somehow still carries the natural tannic structure that defines the grape. It has lift, energy, and freshness, but it is not a simple chillable red. There is real depth here.
The DOC commission actually rejected the wine the first time it was submitted. Andrea and Lucia bottled it anyway. It went on to become their signature wine.
The fruit comes from the Vigna del Pozzo vineyard at 190 meters elevation with northeast exposure on red clay and yellow sand soils. Fermentation is spontaneous, malolactic is spontaneous in steel, and the wine ages eleven months in steel with minimal sulfur and absolutely no oak. Fewer than five thousand bottles are produced annually.
Nothing about this wine feels designed to impress in the obvious ways. It feels lived in. A little stubborn. Which, for me, feels exactly right.
90 Points, Wine Enthusiast
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