New Arrivals From Cipriano Barsanti
A delivery from Cipo’s two vineyards, Macea and Camiliano, has recently landed with us in the UK. As you may well have seen, we had the man himself with us in London and Edinburgh over the weekend, showing the wines himself. If you were lucky enough to get a taste of his minimal production from his family vines at Macea, then you will understand our excitement to have these wines back on our portfolio pages.
Cipo, a person of what appears to be infinite talent (semi-pro table tennis player, biodynamics lecturer and winemaker), heads up two projects in the hills of Borgo a Mozzano, Tuscany. Macea is a family project, an experiment with famously French varieties in a uniquely cool microclimate best suited to the grape Pinot Noir, headed up by Cipriano and his brother Antonio. Macea, Cipo explains, is his laboratory. With the 1.25 ha of vines, he produces as much wine as possible. In the best year, this would be less than 6,000 bottles. Tiny quantities give room to test out big ideas. These ideas and successes are transported to his more extensive cellar at Camiliano, a project born from the desire to provide larger quantities, making his wines more accessible to the ever-thirsty international market his wines have gained.
On these hills, Pinot Noir is king. Macea’s reputation for these wines is so great that Cipo himself has been honoured with the position of president of the Tuscan Pinot Noir Association, of which there are 15 local members championing the variety. The production at Macea, however, is unique for the region. True to Pinot Noir’s spiritual home of Burgundy, the wines are fermented in open containers, whole bunch, for both white and red wines, and aged in barriques, until the wine is deemed ready to bottle.
This year we have some old favourites back after a long hiatus, the Sauvignon Blanc & Pinot Gris, of which we received all of 30 bottles of each (production was one barrel only) and Campo di Macea, a mythical wine, which went out of production some ten years ago, old vines, extraordinary depth, as good as we remember, a blend of 2019 & 2020, one barrel of each made two. Naturally, we have double of this.
If you don’t manage to snap up any of these tiny quantity wines from Macea, you will no doubt still be in luck. Step out of the lab and into Camiliano, where we have some excellent examples of Cipriano’s winemaking genius.
Everything is available now until we run out.
