Wine & Spirits - Spring 2022 - 36

T
he cobbled streets of radda were quiet when i
arrived in early December, around the start of the
Omicron wave, but at the end of Via Roma I found
a warm welcome at La Bottega di Giovannino. Monica Bernardoni,
the chef and wine buyer, told me that her father
started the business as a small supermarket; he had a little
bar in the corner where you could stand and eat a sandwich.
Monica added a kitchen, and her rendition of peposo
(beef braised in red wine and black pepper) was just what
I wanted on a chilly winter afternoon.
It's not hard to choose a wine at La Bottega; Monica keeps
a bottle of each wine along one wall of the dining room, and
you just point to what you want. I chose a bottle of Montevertine
Pian del Ciampolo, and she nodded approvingly; her
selections are organized according to the different villages
of Chianti Classico, and the Montevertine was in the Radda
section. " When I started, the selection was
broader, " she recalls, with wines from all over
Italy that she wanted to introduce to local customers.
As the tourist traffic picked up in recent
years, her international customers began asking
for more local wines. There are only around 30
producers in Radda, and Monica knows them
all. When selecting wines for her restaurant, she
says, " The quality is important, but it is also
important to tell the story of the people who
make the wine. " In fact, many of the producers
in Radda have good stories to tell.
R
vary wildly across its 173,000 acres, yet, until recently, you
had just three choices in types of wine to buy: Chianti Classico
Annata, Riserva or Gran Selezione, categories defined
more by aging requirements than by place. The Chianti
Classico consorzio's approval last June of the new UGAs,
each centered around its own village and, ideally, sharing
some common terroir features that translate to a particular
wine style, encourages wine drinkers to think about Chianti
Classico as 11 different zones. If you were to blind taste
wines from each of the 11 UGAs, some would be more distinctive
and easier to identify than others-the latter from
larger, more diverse UGAs. Radda wines tend to fall into
that first category. They are wines for sangiovese purists, for
those who appreciate a jolt of acidity and the scrape of raspy
tannins. For now, the UGA names can appear only on the
front labels of Gran Selezione wines, but it is a step in the
direction of greater territorial identity within
Chianti Classico.
oberto bianchi's parents came to
Radda in 1974. His father was Italian,
his mother of Greek and Welsh origin;
neither had any experience with making
wine. Val delle Corti had been abandoned, as
were so many properties when the mezzadria
(the region's sharecropping system) dissipated
in the 1950s and '60s. The Bianchis planned to use the
property as a country retreat, and Roberto's father began
to learn about wine from books and from local growers.
Roberto was teaching Italian literature to American students
when his father died in 1999, and he decided to try
to make something of the Radda estate.
Radda is one of the eleven new Unità Geografiche Aggi " The
quality is
important, but
it is also important
to tell the
story of the people
who make
the wine. "
MONICA BERNARDONI
michele braganti's family came to radda
around the same time as Bianchi's. They
bought Monteraponi, an abandoned country
house with 12 acres of vines, but stayed
in Florence, where his father had a silver factory.
Braganti's mother sent him to work at
Monteraponi in 1997 " because I wasn't a good
student, " he says. He learned about wine from
the family's one vineyard employee, and they
sold the grapes off until 2003, when Braganti
decided to start making his own wine. I met
Braganti on a Sunday evening in Florence,
where he was getting ready to leave for a family
trip. We tasted through his current releases
at Enoteca Pitti Gola e Cantina, a cozy wine
bar across the street from the Pitti Palace, the
wines poured by Edoardo Fioravanti, one of
untive (UGAs) recognized by the Chianti Classico consorzio
in 2021. It includes the village of Radda and its surrounding
farmland-nearly 20,000 acres, though only eight
percent of that is planted to vineyards. The rest consists of
rugged hills, deep valleys and dense forests that hug the
high, eastern edge of the Chianti Classico zone. Bianchi's
20 acres of vines run down the hill from his cellar on eastfacing
slopes at elevations of around 1,600 feet, and when
he arrived two decades ago, the cool site made ripening the
grapes a challenge. " At that time, if you said 'I make wine in
Radda,' people would say, 'Oh, too bad.' Radda wines in the
seventies and eighties were very sharp and acidic. " Bianchi's
tiny cellar is cold and damp; it's basically a shed crowded
with stainless-steel tanks and large botte. I kept my jacket
on as we stood at a cluttered shelf to taste his 2018 Chianti
Classico. The wine was translucent ruby, with fresh floral
scents, pure red cherry flavors and bracing acidity.
It is exactly this style of wine that drew me to Radda. Chianti
Classico is large and diverse; soil types and elevations
36
WINE & SPIR IT S
S PR IN g 202 2
the enoteca's owners.
Braganti makes a Chianti Classico Annata and a Riserva
(Il Campitello), the latter from 55-year-old vines. Both are
sangiovese with about ten percent of other local varieties.
Monteraponi is in Radda's southern sector, which has a
higher percentage of the calcareous alberese in the soils. In
fact, Braganti makes a third sangiovese-based wine called
Baron' Ugo from a vineyard with pure alberese soils. It was
a Chianti Classico Riserva until 2012, when the wine did
not reach the minimum 12.5 percent alcohol, so he has
labeled it an IGT wine since then.
Braganti's Chianti Classico Annata is easy to peg as a
Radda wine-high-toned, red-fruited, plenty of tension
yet also perfumed and easy to drink. It must have caught
Fioravanti's attention-the enoteca owner carries wines
from all of the Chianti Classico UGAs, but he has a disproportionately
high number from Radda. " You get wines
with more perfume and elegance from Radda, " he said,
" but sometimes you have to teach the clients that this is
what they should like. " In other words, Radda wines have
a distinctive style, but it takes some getting used to, especially
for people who are more accustomed to boldly ripe
and heavily oaked wines.
In fact, Braganti recalled being encouraged to make ripe
wines with new barrels back in 2003, when he was just
starting out at Monteraponi. He had asked for advice from
Team Radda
CLOCKWISE FROM
TOP LEFT: ROBERTO
BIANCHI OF VAL DELLE
CORTI; ANgELA FRONTI
OF ISTINE; DIEgO FENOCCHI
STANDINg IN
L'ERTA DI RADDA; MONTERAPONI'S
MICHELE
BRAgANTI ATOP HIS
ALBERESE-RICH BARON'
UgO VINEYARD
Wine & Spirits - Spring 2022

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