Bibi Graetz

Old vines above Florence

The fruit still sets the pace for Bibi Graetz, winemaker at Bibi Graetz in Fiesole, where the bench is vineyard, cellar, and label table. He founded the winery in 2000 on the hill of Fiesole after training at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence, bringing a painter’s habit of looking to a trade that answers more slowly. The family ground reaches toward Vincigliata, the ancient village behind Fiesole near Castello di Vincigliata, a castle dating to 1031 and owned by the family since 1960. That place gave the first wines their axis: Testamatta and Colore, made from native Tuscan varieties rather than an inherited house recipe. Graetz did not come through a formal wine lineage. His apprenticeship was more lateral, through old farmers, old vineyards, repeated seasons, and the correction that comes when a barrel says less than the fruit. He has said, “I was very much in love from the first moment with the work in the vineyard.” Since 2000, that love has had to behave like discipline: reading Sangiovese, Canaiolo, Colorino, Ansonica, and Vermentino across separate parcels, then deciding what belongs together.

A blend against the single plot

The method here resists the single-vineyard reflex. Graetz blends across Tuscany, working old, high-altitude vineyards as a way to draw a larger line through the region rather than isolate one parcel. The estate works with about 80 hectares of very old vines across Tuscany, with many sites above 300 meters; on Isola del Giglio, vineyards run from sea level to 300 meters, with new plantings at 550 meters. The Fiesole plot has grown to 4.5 hectares, close enough to the winery to make the vineyard feel less like an address than a station. In the cellar, the red work stays close to traditional handling: spontaneous fermentations in open-top barriques and old wine barrels, manual punch-downs, maceration in barrique or steel when the lot asks for it. Testamatta, a Toscana IGT Sangiovese, is sourced from seven plots and aged in old barrels, with no new oak. Colore, built from Sangiovese, Canaiolo, and Colorino in roughly one-third parts, accepts a little new oak for volume, then returns to the older wood that lets fruit keep its edge.

The Aurora rooms and the hill

The place has more than one texture. In Vincigliata, the work feels tied to stone, slope, and the Castello across the road; in Fiesole, the converted Aurora hotel on Piazza Mino gives the house a different kind of frame, with Florence below and the hill holding the air cooler than the city. The tasting room is private in mood rather than theatrical, a place for glass, label, and vineyard to meet without the noise of scale. The cellar language follows that restraint. Old barrels sit behind wines whose labels carry Graetz’s own visual hand, so the painter is present without having to explain the bottle. The room remains conversational. The method does most of the speaking.

Where the hand remains visible

What matters at Bibi Graetz is the refusal to separate image, vineyard, and cellar into tidy compartments. The label is not packaging after the fact; it belongs to the same eye that chooses when oak has become too loud, as it did after 2005, and when old wood should take over. The next release will be judged in the same narrow passage between fruit and frame, especially when Testamatta leaves the old barrels of Fiesole.