Producer Profile
Pruneto
Chianti, Tuscany, Italy

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Pruneto

Chianti, Tuscany, Italy

The freshest and most mineral Chianti Classico you’ll ever taste

Pruneto is a symbol of the purest elegance that can be achieved in Chianti and has been forgotten by so many. Committed to learning from local farmers to best understand the true potential of the region and of the local grapes, Riccardo Lanza has become a guardian of the region’s ancestral knowledge.

Location: Radda in Chianti, Tuscany, Italy

Working with us since: 2020

Total area under vine: 3.5 hectares

Viticultural Standards: Organic (Non-certified)

Website: pruneto.it

Interesting fact: In his quest to learn and revive many of the local viticultural techniques, Riccardo uses, in addition to cordon-training, a more traditional training method called Archetto Toscano. While rather similar to the Guyot method, in the Archetto Toscano the canes are bent instead of trained to grow horizontally.

Pruneto Wines

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.

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