Azienda Agricola Lombardo

Prugnolo Gentile before the cellar

Prugnolo Gentile sets the first decision for Francesco Lombardo, winemaker at Azienda Agricola Lombardo in Gracciano Di Montepulciano. The estate sits in the hills around Montepulciano, with family vineyards in Gracciano, Confino and Caggiole, and its work keeps close to the local Tuscan register: Vino Nobile di Montepulciano DOCG, Rosso di Montepulciano and Chianti Colli Senesi rather than a cellar built around fashion. Lombardo’s own reading of wine stays tied to memory, inheritance and the layers beneath a first impression; here, that sense of context has a material place to land. The family estate was founded in 1972 by Antonino Lombardo, who came from Sicily to Tuscany and set the house on the long path of Montepulciano winemaking. Francesco works within that second-generation inheritance, where the cellar does not separate technique from family memory. The house grows traditional Tuscan varieties, with Prugnolo Gentile at the center, supported by Canaiolo Nero, Mammolo, Malvasia, Trebbiano Toscano and Merlot. Its scale remains legible from the vineyard outward: over 30 hectares, family owned, rural in manner, more concerned with the fruit from its own slopes than with a designed performance of hospitality.

A blend held to local proportions

The method begins in the vineyard zones rather than at the tasting table. Gracciano, Confino and Caggiole give the estate its working map, with clay, limestone and galestro soils suited to Sangiovese and the measured ripening that Tuscan hill country allows. In the primary blends, Prugnolo Gentile accounts for 80%, with the remaining 20% shaped by the companion varieties the house uses for balance and contour. Stainless steel tanks give fermentation control and preserve freshness before the wines move, according to the cuvée, into oak. For Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, the aging period runs 12-18 months in new French oak barrels from Allier and Slavonian oak barrels. Rosso di Montepulciano takes a shorter route, about six months in French oak, keeping the fruit closer to the surface. Chianti Colli Senesi draws on Canaiolo Nero, Mammolo, Malvasia and Trebbiano Toscano alongside the Sangiovese base, a more old-form Tuscan grammar that keeps red fruit, floral lift and tannin in the same sentence. None of this asks for spectacle. The discipline is proportion, vessel and time.

The cellar below the hills

The cellar here belongs to a working estate rather than a staged tasting room. The atmosphere is quiet, rural and practical, with the vineyard hills doing much of the speaking before a glass is poured. A standard tasting or a walk through the vines makes the place easier to understand: rows in Gracciano, the pull of Confino and Caggiole, barrels chosen for structure rather than shine. The room is intimate in the old family-winery sense, where the bench is replaced by tank, barrel and vineyard path, and the craft moves by repetition. The house does not need to turn its inheritance into theater; it keeps returning to Prugnolo Gentile, French oak from Allier, Slavonian oak and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano.