Once Upon a Time in Bolgheri

It is 1953. A young woman is traveling west across Italy with her husband and their small daughter. The little one is too young to understand what moving means, too young to know what the place and land you grow up on can shape so much of your life in ways you cannot choose. Imagine the mother keeping her entertained in the way mothers do: pointing at things passing by, naming them, maybe looking at shapes in the clouds, turning the unfamiliar into a game of curiosity.

They are moving west to look for work, for land, and for the possibility of a better life, like many others before them. None of them has ever been this far from home, but the decision was taken; they are likely worried, but they push away the concern and focus on what is ahead of them. The promise of something new, a change, for as scary as that may be.

Marisa, this is the name of the little girl, is on the ground now, she is taking her first steps on a new land, breathing new air. A salty breeze blows through her hair, sand around her.
She doesn’t know it yet, but she will never leave.
And her life will be deeply rooted in this new land she has just seen for the first time.

A Strip of Coast

Bolgheri sits on the Tyrrhenian coast of Tuscany, in the municipality of Castagneto Carducci, province of Livorno. It is not large: a narrow coastal plain stretching roughly 13 kilometers from the sea toward the hills, sheltered to the east by the Colline Metallifere and open to the west toward the Mediterranean. The landscape is distinctive: the famous Viale dei Cipressi, a five-kilometre avenue lined with over two thousand cypress trees, leads from the Via Aurelia into the village of Bolgheri itself.

The terrain is a patchwork of marine deposits, river pebbles, limestone, and volcanic rock; complex, varied soils that drain well and retain just enough water to manage the heat of the Tuscan summer. Sea breezes from the Tyrrhenian moderate temperatures throughout the growing season. The result is a microclimate of unusual consistency, warm but not excessive, with long autumns that allow for slow, complete ripening.

Until the middle of the 20th century, none of this was considered serious wine country. The land was largely given over to pasture, grain, and the kind of mixed farming that defined the Maremma coast for centuries. Wine was made here, but not wine anyone was paying attention to. But as in many cases, things change.

The Marchese

Mario Incisa della Rocchetta was born in Rome in 1899 into an aristocratic Piedmontese family with a long history in agriculture. An agronomist, he developed a passion for Bordeaux wines early in life, and in 1930 married Clarice della Gherardesca, a descendant of one of Tuscany's oldest families, whose lineage in Maremma traced back to the 9th century.

Clarice's dowry included Tenuta San Guido: 2,500 hectares of land in Bolgheri, stretching from the coast to the hills. As the Second World War deepened and the chaos of the regime became harder to ignore, they retreated to the estate. Mario had by this point already made enemies in certain quarters: his approach to land management included a profit-sharing system designed to revitalize the property and incentivize his workers, openly clashing with the prevailing fascist ideology and local authorities. Bolgheri was, in some ways, both an escape and a statement.

Once settled on the estate, Mario turned his attention to the land.
The soils at Tenuta San Guido (gravelly, stony, complex) bore a striking resemblance to the Graves region of Bordeaux, which he knew well: though not identical, it was close enough to make him wonder. In the mid-1940s, he planted Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. The first wine was bottled in 1945: rough, tannic, and nothing like what it would eventually become, and it was given exclusively to family and friends. Mario called it, with characteristic understatement, "a simple, vague experiment."

A SuperTuscan is Born

As it often happens with nobility, different families are linked through close or distant relatives. And so it was that Mario's wife, Clarice, was linked to the Antinori family through her sister. Piero Antinori was already taking care of the family wine business, and one day he tasted the Sassicaia at his relative's table. He understood immediately what he was looking at. He wasted no time and together with Antinori's oenologist Giacomo Tachis (who had brought knowledge back from Bordeaux) they produced the first commercial vintage of Sassicaia. Ironically, it was released as vino da tavola (table wine), the lowest designation in the Italian classification system, because the regulations had no category for a Bordeaux-style wine made in coastal Tuscany.

But a label is not necessarily an indication of quality; shortly after, Decanter magazine held a blind tasting of international Cabernet blends and Sassicaia won, beating wines from eleven countries. The wine that had been dismissed as a table wine was now being discussed in the same breath as Bordeaux Premier Crus.

What followed was a movement. Grattamacco, Le Macchiole, Ornellaia, Masseto, each new estate added further weight to the argument that Bolgheri was not an accident but a genuinely exceptional terroir.
The DOC followed the wines rather than the other way around; the Bolgheri DOC was created initially covering only whites and rosés simply because the reds were too unconventional for the existing regulatory framework (it was later granted in 1983). Interestingly, in the early ‘90s, Bolgheri Sassicaia was granted its own DOC recognition. This is unique, as it is the only wine in Italy with an appellation named after a single estate.

The Other Side of the Story

While all of this was happening in the upper registers of the Italian wine world (aristocratic estates, Bordeaux connections, international critics, prices that were climbing fast) a different kind of story was unfolding a few kilometres away.

That little girl we started with from the 1953 car journey was Marisa Chiappini, only a child when her family moved from the Marche to Maremma. This was part of a broader movement of agricultural workers displaced by the collapse of the mezzadria system (the sharecropping arrangement that had organized rural Italy for centuries). Under postwar land reform, the government expropriated the great estates and redistributed the land into small parcels (called poderi) for peasant farmers. Families like the Chiappini arrived with almost nothing and started farming: vegetables, grain, whatever the land and the circumstances permitted.

Marisa grew up in San Guido, in the shadow of the cypress avenue and the estates that would become famous, and she watched the transformation of Bolgheri from farmland to wine country through the 1970s and 1980s with the perspective of someone who had lived it from the ground up.
When the Bolgheri boom gained momentum, Marisa and her family saw an opportunity and founded Fattoria Casa di Terra, a solid, well-regarded estate that became a successful operation. But for Marisa, something remained unfinished: she wanted the personal touch, a feeling of artisan quality and deliberate decisions. So, in 2018, she went back to the beginning, and took the family's original small property, renovated it, planted five hectares of organic vineyard, and asked her son Giuliano (a well established winemaker in Bolgheri) and her grandson Alessio to help run it.

The new estate was called PodereSette.

Seven Sins, One Estate

The name and the wines carry a joke. The seven deadly sins are attributed, affectionately, to Giuliano, each wine named after one of them. It is the kind of detail that tells you something about the culture of the place: serious about the wine, relaxed about the presentation.

The philosophy behind PodereSette is, in some ways, a counterpoint to the origin story of Bolgheri itself. Where Sassicaia was born from aristocratic vision, private wealth, and Bordeaux aspiration, PodereSette is the product of a family that arrived here as migrant farmworkers in the ‘50s and, over seventy years, earned their way into proprietorship. Certified organic from the beginning. Five hectares. Boutique production. The wines use both Bolgheri's international varieties and a sensibility that produces something different from the estate-driven prestige model that defines the denomination's upper tier.

I find it a remarkable arc, and a very uplifting story; after all, everyone likes an underdog!

The Wines

	L'Invidio – Bolgheri Rosso DOC This is Envy, the entry point into the PodereSette range and the wine that most directly captures the Bolgheri style in an approachable, everyday register. A blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Syrah, showing the vegetal and fruity integration that defines well-made coastal Tuscan reds. Smooth tannins, a clean finish, and the kind of freshness that reflects both the sea breeze and the organic farming. Not a wine that asks for patience.
	Il Superbo – Bolgheri Superiore DOC Here comes Pride, obviously the flagship. Bolgheri Superiore requires a minimum 12 months of ageing and a higher concentration of the principal varietals. This is PodereSette at its most structured: deeper, more complex, built for the medium term rather than immediate drinking. The estate's small size and organic approach concentrate the flavours in a way that a larger operation would struggle to replicate.
	Il Sette – IGT Toscana, Cabernet Franc Pure Cabernet Franc, the variety that played a supporting role in the Sassicaia blend but rarely gets to speak for itself in Bolgheri. Here it does, in an IGT format that allows the freedom the DOC regulations don't. Deep ruby, strong vegetal notes integrated with fruit and florals, smooth and well-balanced tannins. It is the wine that most directly signals what PodereSette is doing differently: not chasing the Cabernet Sauvignon prestige model, but asking what this particular terroir does to a variety that has been here from the beginning and never quite had its moment.

What This Means in Singapore

Bolgheri is not an obscure denomination in this market. Sassicaia and Ornellaia are well known here, well distributed, and well understood by the kind of wine buyer who pays attention. They are genuinely great wines and their reputations are deserved.
But they are also, by now, investment wines as much as drinking wines, priced at a level that puts them beyond casual consideration and associated so strongly with prestige that the conversation around them tends to be about status as much as taste.

What PodereSette offers is something different: wine from the same appellation, the same terroir, the same coastal soils and sea-breeze climate that made the name famous, at a scale and a price point that puts the focus back on what is in the glass. The response we have seen from our customers confirms that this is an argument people are ready to hear. 

Not everyone wants the Sassicaia story.
Some people just want a great Bolgheri.