Natural Wine Producers: Working With Nature
Portraits and interviews with the world's finest natural wine producers — farmers and winemakers who work in harmony with terroir, minimal intervention, and a deep respect for the land.
Cantine Benvenuto
An Abruzzo-born agronomist, Giovanni Benvenuto returned to his grandfather's Calabrian land to rescue the near-extinct Zibibbo di Pizzo and champion native varieties.
San Lurnis
Marco Pecorari revived his family's 1874 estate in San Lorenzo Isontino, Friuli, producing only ancestral-method sparkling wines from 50-year-old Malvasia Istriana vines on the alluvial plains between Collio and the Isonzo river.
Cristiano Guttarolo
On the Murge plateau above Gioia del Colle, Cristiano Guttarolo coaxes a rare lightness and minerality from Primitivo, fermenting some of it in beeswax-sealed Umbrian amphorae.
Meigamma
Barbara and Giuseppe Pusceddu make searingly pure Sardinian wine from 1.1 hectares of coastal vines near Cagliari, guided by a philosophy whose name translates simply as 'afternoon nap.'
Piccolo Podere del Ceppaiolo
Danilo Marcucci and Riccardo Pennaforti protect one of Umbria's oldest vineyards near Assisi on just 1.7 hectares, fermenting ancient local varieties spontaneously in cement and resin tanks with zero sulfur additions.
Stefano Amerighi
Stefano Amerighi is Cortona's great Syrah champion: a Demeter-certified biodynamic farmer who identified his ideal hillside terroir in 2001, planted Rhone clones, and now produces wines that belong in conversation with the finest expressions of the variety anywhere in the world.
Angelo Negro
A Roero family whose deeds reach back to 1670, with a forebear who bottled one of the first dry Arneis on record in 1971.
Cantina Martinelli
Working vines inherited from his grandfather, Francesco Martinelli makes mineral, biodynamic Garganega from a forest-ringed cru in Soave, against the grain of the region's co-ops.
Le Coste di Gradoli – Natural Wine Standard Bearers
Le Coste di Gradoli, which has long since become one of the darlings of natural wine lovers the world over and has attained something of a…
Ercole
An everyday-Piedmont label built with a generations-old Monferrato growers' cooperative, putting honest, old-vine wines in screw-cap liter bottles.
Fabio Gea
A geologist turned vigneron, Fabio Gea farms under two hectares near Barbaresco and ferments his Nebbiolo in porcelain eggs of his own design.
Sassocorno
Four friends founded Sassocorno in 2017 in Corno di Rosazzo, Friuli, choosing the land out of love rather than inheritance to grow native varieties organically and make spontaneously fermented wines that taste of eastern Friuli's mineral seabed soils.