Podere le Ripi
Videos
Experiencing Podere le Ripi
... ... The Video depicts the Experience at Podere le Ripi: the visit at the vineyards, the Golden Cellar and Tasting of our wines. Join us for a fantastic experience.
Book here: http://podereleripi.it/en/454/bookings
Or send an email to: visit@podereleripi.it Podere le Ripi's Owner, Francesco Illy, drives around his property in Montalcino and tells the story about his land.... Podere le Ripi's Owner, Francesco Illy, drives around his property in Montalcino and tells the story about his land. ...
Experiencing Podere le Ripi
Le Ripi Story | The Experience |
Vineyards tour with Francesco Illy, owner of Podere le Ripi | Podere le Ripi
The Tuscan Garden Experience
The estate has been called Podere Le Ripi since the year 1200 when the area was inhabited by shepherds and farmers. In 1997, I bought these 54 hectares
of pure, unspoilt and wild land from a Sardinian shepherd and three years later began planting the first vines. In fact, I had just wanted to buy a lovely house in Tuscany but I fell in love so deeply with this untouched landscape that I became a wine-grower.
Francesco Illy, born in Trieste in 1953, began promoting the Swiss sales of Illy products under the Amici brand at the end of the 1970s. Around the turn of the millennium, his innate curiosity spurred him on to discover more about winegrowing. He already had many other passions including sailing and flying but this was "the most wonderful adventure of my life",
he says today with pride.
Philosophy
To me, Biodynamics reflects the old-fashioned way our ancestors used to grow plants and make wines for
thousands of years, before the modern methods took place.
For this reason, a soil which is treated biodynamically is very similar to the soil of a woodland and very different from the soil of a conventional farm winery. Our soil is less compact and contains a great amount of humus, showing an incredibly strong and complex inner life, from worms to bacteria as well as many other vegetal and animal biological activities.
Biodynamic farming is, by definition, a philosophy that allows a farm to become a living entity inscribed in
the larger context of the whole universe. That’s why in Biodynamics a calendar of the planetary events is very
important. The moon phases determine the days in which certain activities must be done, from bottling or
planting to preparing and spraying the 500 and 501 mixtures and the herbal preparations.
Biography
A while ago, in 1984, I fell in love with Montalcino. I am a nature photographer and these landscapes – as our poet Ungaretti would say – “flooded me with the light of the immense” and simply stole my soul: I needed to have a house there. So, in 1987 I began searching for my Tuscan “mansion” without even thinking about producing wine: I was a wine lover who thought he was too old to enter this world made of incredibly long waiting periods. Every estate proposal was either too big, too expensive or not suitable… so it took ten years before my friend Carlo Vittori called me and said: “I found the place, hurry up here and take a look, before the housing prices in Montalcino explode!” And, recalling his words now…how right he was!
So, I made it back to Tuscany driving from Switzerland (I used to live there) and after a six hours drive I met
a shepherd who was taking his afternoon nap under a centenary Oak. His sheep were bleating and ruminating around him and the big white Maremmano Shepherd dogs were running in circles to keep the herd in place.
I immediately understood that this was my place. The place of my life.
The beauty, the distance from what we would call “civilization”, the absolute absence of the horrible architectural slaughter of the last century that has destroyed so many Italian landscapes. That’s where we are: a land in the middle of the UNESCO World Heritage site Orcia Valley, with the perfumes that pervade all year long around these hills, the deep view to the east on Monticchiello and Montepulciano, the prehistoric volcano Monte Amiata to the south, the near amphitheatrical hills protecting Le Ripi to the west and north sides... all of this was so
spectacular...
The estate was also so uncontaminated. Unpopulated for thousands of years with a poor and dry soil that gives very poor crops, it reaches over 40°C in summer and has frozen lakes during winter, with 400-year-old olive trees, forests of incredibly many different trees and shrubs, and flowers - flowers, flowers everywhere - all year round. Not to mention wild asparagus, Porcini mushrooms, blackberries, the white and black truffles that only my friend Francesco’s dog was able to unearth, the wonderful red “corbezzolo” (arbutus), as well as wildlife, with rabbits and deer, boars and porcupines, wolves and yews, badgers and foxes, eagles from the Amiata Mountain and herons,
buzzards, hawks, and the storks passing by the Orcia river twice a year, or all kinds of ducks that come into my lakes.
In 2017 I had the opportunity to increase my estate adding a plot of vineyard located on the other side of
Montalcino, north-west side. So now we have two different terroir that give us different wines.
This is my dream come true: Podere Le Ripi
Wines from Podere le Ripi
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