When Giuseppe Lanza bought the house of Pruneto in the late 1960s, the Chianti hills were still lined by off-the-beaten-track winding roads that very few would drive along. The local economy relied on small farming and the days of Chianti’s international glory were yet to come.
Riccardo, Giuseppe’s son, moved to Pruneto in the early 1970s after completing his Agricultural Science degree at the University of Milan, determined to learn directly from the old local farmers and start producing wine that would truly reflect the character of the local ancestral traditions. He planted the first Pruneto vineyard in 1972 on the rocky, limestone and marl south-facing one-hectare parcel that still supplies the fruit to the Pruneto Riserva.
Riccardo has since been farming organically, with minimum cultivation so as to preserve the soil’s microbiological activity and biodiversity. Now covering a total three and a half hectares, the vines have never seen any herbicides or pesticides and remain one of the smallest and most artisanally kept in Chianti.
Riccardo follows an equally pure approach in the cellar: all the wines are fermented spontaneously and bottled unfiltered with minimum addition of sulphites. His first wines were bottled in 1981.
Pruneto is, undoubtedly, one of the freshest and most mineral expressions of Chianti Classico that you’ll ever taste. A very ‘natural’ outcome (all puns intended) of Riccardo’s modern and knowledgeable take on terroir and ancestral methods.
