Rocca di Frassinello

Grosseto | Tuscany

The great Rocca di Frassinello project was born not from a big one but from a small idea. A small idea because linked to the development needs of Castellare, but a big project when the intervention of Domanin Barone of Rothschild-Lafite came, giving birth to the first join venture between an Italian and a French company. Like other Chianti companies, in fact, even Castellare di Castellina, which has belonged to Paolo Panerai for almost 30 years, had had to note, at the end of the 90s, that in the Chianti Classico area it had become very difficult, almost impossible, to expand: due to lack of high-quality soils; for the urban planning complications that require the building permit also to plant a vineyard. The historical and natural outlet of Siena and therefore of the Chianti Classico has always been the Maremma. And so some years ago a sort of transhumance had begun from the Chianti hills towards the sea of ​​that land that was once the home of malaria before the reclamation started already by the Grand Duke Leopoldo of Tuscany.But the Maremma as well as bitter (in the past) is also large and with a consolidated wine tradition to the north (with Bolgheri and surroundings) and to the south, facing the Argentario, with the restricted territory of Morellino di Scansano. Almost all the Chianti people had gone there, north and preferably south. Castellare's choice had been not to focus on the obvious and the already known, but to understand if in the rest of the Maremma there were lands as or more qualified than those of Bolgheri and Scansano. Ezio Rivella, a veteran of the extraordinary experience of Villa Banfi in Montalcino, were there and had discovered them, and Gianni Zonin, who with his new name Gianni Zonin Vinyards has collected one of the most beautiful collections of top-level companies in Italy and in the United States.