Producer Profile: San Polino

Montalcino’s first certified organic estate.....

Producer profile: San Polino

Owned and run by Luigi (Gigi) Fabbro from Friuli and Londoner Katia Nussbaum.

When I last visited, the washing was hanging out on the line in front of the farmhouse – it’s that kind of place.

We conversed around the kitchen table, where we would have tasted the wines too if Nussbaum had not been baking a rather delicious smelling lasagna.

Fabbro is a whirlpool of ideas. He is, among other things, a trained chemist and a computer scientist, and in another life he studied biodiversity in the Amazon jungle.

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San Polino was Montalcino’s first certified organic estate and is now run on biodynamic lines.

‘We tend to make the wines first and think about how to sell them later,’ says Nussbaum, an approach exemplified by the decision to bottle three different versions of the 2012 Brunello, each fermented with a different strain of indigenous yeasts.

The wines are joyful. They have depth and power and a wonderfully expressive complexity.

I had the privilege in 2016 to taste the 2001 Brunello and it went immediately into my mental catalogue of all-time greats.

Richard Baudains is the regional chair for Veneto in the Decanter World Wine Awards.