Aia Vecchia

Responsibility carried into the cellar

The decision is made lot by lot: what stays lifted, what takes structure, what carries the coast. Elia Pellegrini, winemaker at Aia Vecchia in Bolgheri, works inside a family estate whose name began formally in 1996, after generations of Pellegrini farming in this part of Tuscany. His place here is not only technical. He holds the house as owner and vintner, carrying a family winery between Bolgheri and Castagneto Carducci while keeping its wines legible in the glass.

Pellegrini came to the cellar after professional football, with Livorno, Colligiana and Pergocrema marking the earlier discipline before his shift into wine in 2011. The change reads less like a departure than a transfer of habits: repetition, pressure, judgment under constraint. At Aia Vecchia those habits move through vineyards, blends and release decisions rather than a match calendar. Lagone, Sor Ugo and Orleto form the clearest map of his work here, each tied to the estate’s Bolgheri identity and to the Bordeaux varieties that have settled into this stretch of coast.

Bordeaux varieties under Tyrrhenian light

Aia Vecchia works from vineyards split between Bolgheri and Maremma, with the estate described at around 100 hectares in total. Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot give the red program its shape; Vermentino, Viognier and Sangiovese sit within the wider house language. The Bolgheri vineyards lie near the lower half of Via Bolgherese, at the foot of Collina di Segalari, where maritime air and hillside exposure matter as much as cellar handling.

The method here is not presented as a manifesto. It is a conventional estate winery, focused on still reds and still whites, with relatively small lots and a house style built around accessible Super Tuscan Bordeaux-style blends. Lagone carries the estate’s broadest recognition, while Sor Ugo gives a more structured reading of the same coastal vocabulary. The cellar’s task is to keep fruit, tannin and oak in proportion so that the wines remain recognizable as Aia Vecchia rather than as exercises in ripeness or polish.

The rural quiet between Bolgheri and Castagneto Carducci

The tasting room sits within a working Tuscan estate, not apart from it. Around it, the vineyard rows run through countryside shaped by the nearby sea and the low hills behind the coast. The mood is quiet, classic, rural. The cellar, the tasting room and the vineyard visit all point back to the same source: land held by one family, read through successive seasons, then translated into bottles that do not need much theater around them.

Inside that quiet, the work keeps its own pace. The room is intimate, the program small enough for the place to feel bench-side, even when the subject is hectares rather than a single bench. Pellegrini’s next move is the same one the estate asks of him each vintage: to keep the family name steady through Lagone, Sor Ugo and Orleto.