Stone, Song, and Sangiovese

Picture this: ten people around a table, no one knows each other, but all share a common passion of good food and wine. It’s evening, the table is outdoors, there is a little electricity in the air, the atmosphere is vibrant. These people have gathered to participate in something new: the birth of a passion project. This was the very first tasting event I ever hosted, before TerraVino had officially launched, before most of the people at that table knew what we were building.

We had fourteen wines across the flight, paired with food throughout (I had spent two days cooking). The evening built toward the reds, and the final three were the ones I had been curious about: a Vino Nobile di Montepulciano Gran Selezione by Cantine Dei (A.K.A. Madonna della Querce), followed by a Brunello di Montalcino and a Brunello Riserva, all paired with a juicy tomahawk steak, sausages, ribs, and everything else a long table deserves late in the evening.

By that point in the night, we were all a little tipsy, we were pushing ourselves to pay attention (note to self: 14 bottles to try is way too much), and everyone at the table had been quietly anticipating the Brunello. Brunello is Brunello, the name alone carries a certain weight, a certain expectation.
But we tried the Madonna della Querce first. And it stopped us.

Now, I am Florentine, my defaults are strong, full-bodied reds, Chianti Classico, Brunello, pure Sangiovese, the wines I grew up around. Vino Nobile di Montepulciano is a wine I respected but had never quite championed. The tasting went on – we opened the remaining bottles, all good wines – and yet, the table kept going back to the Madonna della Querce, finishing the bottle slowly (not really), returning to it between the others. By the end of the evening, people were asking: when is this coming to Singapore? When can we buy it?

That evening was the beginning of my love story with Cantine Dei.

The Confusion

If you have spent any time navigating Italian wine, you have almost certainly encountered both Montepulciano d'Abruzzo and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, and you may have wondered whether these two Montepulciano are related. Well, they are not. One is a grape variety grown in Abruzzo, on the Adriatic side of central Italy; the other is a place in southern Tuscany, perched on a hill in the province of Siena, where the grape is Sangiovese and the wine has been called Nobile for centuries.
This confusion has followed Vino Nobile di Montepulciano for decades, and the people who make it there are understandably tired of it. So, today we’re talking about Montepulciano the town, Sangiovese the grape, Tuscany the region.

The Pearl of the Renaissance

Montepulciano sits at around 600 metres above sea level in the Val di Chiana, with views that on a clear day stretch to Monte Amiata and the hills of Umbria. One of those Tuscan hilltop towns that appears unchanged since the 16th century, because it largely is.
Wine has been made here since at least 789 AD, but the Renaissance is what gave the town its identity. Under Florentine and Medici influence, Montepulciano became one of the cultural jewels of central Italy, known as la perla del Cinquecento, the pearl of the 16th century. The poet Poliziano was born here. The churches, the palazzi, the layout of the streets all bear the Medici stamp.
And obviously, wine was part of the reputation: by the 16th century, the wine steward of Pope Paul III was describing it as "absolutely perfect", and for the better part of a hundred years, Vino di Montepulciano was poured at the papal table. Not a bad start, wouldn’t you say?

The King of All Wine

And if that weren’t enough, an even more famous endorsement came later from an unexpected direction.
Francesco Redi was a physician at the Medici court (a rather serious scientist by any measure), but he is best remembered today for a single poem. Bacco in Toscana, published in 1685, follows the god Bacchus on a tour of Tuscany's wines. He works through 57 of them. The list ends with Montepulciano, which Bacchus proclaims the king of all wine.

"Montepulciano d'ogni vino è il Re."

The poem was reprinted across Europe for decades. Bacchus was fictional, but the effect was real: Montepulciano now had a literary crown, and that meant something in 17th-century Europe.
The name Vino Nobile (noble wine) itself came later still. Up until the early 20th century the wine was simply called Vino Rosso Scelto di Montepulciano – selected red wine of Montepulciano. It was a local producer named Adamo Fanetti who first put nobile on the label, sometime between the 1920s and 1930s. The wine won gold medals in Paris, Ljubljana, and Milan. The name stuck. And in 1980, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano became the first wine in Italian history to receive the DOCG mark, the highest classification the system offers.

Enter the Dei Family

Which brings us, finally, to Caterina.
In 1964 (the same year Vino Nobile received its DOCG) Alibrando Dei, Caterina's grandfather, bought land on the Bossona hillside and planted the family's first vineyard. For years he sold the grapes to others, like many farmers used to do at the time. But that changed with the next generation.

Caterina's father, Glauco – known locally as l'ingegnere – took over and produced the first Dei vintage in 1985, incidentally one of the most celebrated years in Italian wine history. The bottles were made for family and friends and ran out immediately. The demand that followed set the direction of everything that came after.

Glauco expanded the estate through the late 1980s and 1990s, building the Cantine Dei wines into one of the leading names in Montepulciano. He also ran a successful business in travertine stone (the cream-coloured limestone quarried across central Tuscany), and eventually the two passions converged. The current winery at Villa Martiena is built almost entirely from the family's own travertine, a gravity-fed cellar carved into the hillside, designed by Glauco and Caterina together. Completed between 2014 and 2015, it was Glauco's dream: his wines aging inside walls of his own stone. He saw it realised before he passed. That detail sits at the heart of everything Dei does.

Caterina

Caterina Dei has run the estate for the better part of twenty-five years, and she is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most interesting figures in Italian wine today. Not only because of what she has done with the estate (the wines are consistently among the finest expressions of Vino Nobile, and the critical recognition reflects that), but because of who she is.
Caterina is also, with equal seriousness, a musician: she studied music formally, composes, sings, and has released an album. She believes, and says so directly, that wine and music are the same thing: two forms of sensory art, two ways of communicating something that resists literal translation.
The Dei winery hosts performances by leading Italian musicians, and the estate's collection of travertine sculptures (created by artists from South America, Asia, and Europe) reflects the same instinct: this is a place where the boundaries between making wine and making culture are deliberately blurred.

Tommaso Biagiotti, who represents Dei internationally, told us that "Caterina believes strongly that wine, music, and art are just different forms of inspiration. We produce wine, but we like to communicate wine together with art and music."
It would be easy to be skeptical about this kind of positioning; wine producers who invoke art are sometimes reaching for a layer of prestige that the wine itself doesn't quite justify.
That is not the case here: the wines justify everything.

“To My Father”

Dei works across five distinct vineyard parcels in Montepulciano, each with its own soil and microclimate. The diversity is part of what makes the estate interesting: sandy soils for lighter, fresher wines; clay and fossil-rich subsoils in Bossona for power and structure; the limestone-dominant La Piaggia parcel for the estate's most elegant expression. The focus is Sangiovese (locally called Prugnolo Gentile, the gentle plum) with a small proportion of other varieties used for select wines.

Madonna della Querce - Vino Nobile di Montepulciano DOCG Gran Selezione

The wine that scored highest in our early tastings, and the one that convinced us to bring Dei to Singapore, is Caterina's own project, thirty years into the family's winemaking history.
Madonna della Querce was created in 2015 as a single-vineyard cru from La Piaggia, a 1.5-hectare parcel of limestone-rich soil at 370 metres above sea level. The wine is fermented on indigenous yeasts in steel and aged 24 months in large Slavonian oak casks.

The name itself carries a story: Madonna della Querce refers to a small chapel near the vineyard, built around an oak tree on which, according to local legend, someone once saw an image of the Madonna. Caterina grew up visiting that spot with Glauco. The tree is on the label. The dedication is in the wine. On the label, in small type at the bottom, it reads: "A mio padre" – to my father.

As for what it tastes like, Tommaso describes it as a "horizontal" wine, a bottle you can spend twenty minutes with and keep discovering something new. Red fruit, herbs, leather, a mineral depth, and tannins that are fine and silky from the oak ageing. It is the kind of wine that earns its occasion without requiring one.

Coming soon to TerraVino...

Two further wines are on their way into our portfolio.

Sancta Catharina is an IGT Toscana (a.k.a. super Tuscan), named (with characteristic modesty) after the patron saint who shares the owner's name. This is a wine that allows more flexibility in varieties and style than the DOCG regulations permit.
Riserva Bossona is the estate's other great single-vineyard expression: from Alibrando Dei's original 1964 plantings on the Bossona hillside, aged 36 months in tonneaux, released only in the best vintages. Ruby tending to garnet, violets and underbrush, firm velvety tannins and a long deep finish. It is produced in tiny quantities, and we will announce availability when the time comes.

Tuscany, Still Teaching

One of the recurring themes of this blog is that, when it comes to winemaking, Tuscany is not a single conversation (arguably the same can be said about most Italian wine regions). We have written about Chianti Classico and its Panzano and Montefioralle crus, about Maremma's wild south, and now about Montepulciano; three denominations within the same region that produce Sangiovese in ways that are genuinely, sometimes dramatically, different from one another.

What Montepulciano adds to that picture is history and art. This is a place where the wine was declared the king of all wines by a Medici court physician in 1685 and poured at the papal table for a century, and where today a woman who trained as a musician and fills her winery with sculptures is making some of the finest expressions of Sangiovese in Italy.

Wine, like cooking, is a form of art. It is a way of taking what the land gives you and making it say something. Caterina Dei has been saying something worth listening to for twenty-five years, and we are glad to have her wines singing here in Singapore.