Fattoria Casetto dei Mandorli

Site, light, timing

The work begins with exposure and timing: Alessandro Nicolucci, winemaker at Fattoria Casetto dei Mandorli in Predappio, reads the vineyards before the cellar. In Predappio Alta, the hilltop village above the town, the family estate has made wine continuously since 1885, when Giuseppe Nicolucci acquired the property. The line has stayed close to Sangiovese, close enough that the house name, Casetto dei Mandorli, still feels tied to a particular piece of land rather than to a label.

Nicolucci works here as oenologist, the technical hand responsible for production and wine quality, and also as heir to a family method carried through generations. The estate’s own account places him in continuity with Giuseppe Nicolucci and the family stewardship that followed, with the cellar kept as part of the inheritance rather than remade for effect. His stated requirements are plain: geographic position, sunlight exposure, careful working, the right times and the right ways. That is the discipline. It is not a cellar trick. It is field work brought indoors only after the fruit has earned it.

Five vineyards and an underground cellar

The program rests on five named vineyards: Vigna dei Mandorli, Vigne del Generale, Vigna di Riggiano, Vigna Tre Rocche, and Vigna della Rosa. Sangiovese carries the estate’s center of gravity, with Trebbiano in the white program, both within the Romagna DOC frame. Nicolucci has described a limited scale for his highest quality Sangiovese at 6,000 bottles, a number that suits the way the estate talks about control: site, exposure, and labor before volume.

In the cellar, Sangiovese ages in oak barrels underground, where the work slows down and the house style gathers around patience rather than speed. The barrel program is traditional, not theatrical. Predappio di Predappio – Vigna del Generale, I Mandorli, Tre Rocche, and Nero di Predappio all keep the place names near the front of the wine, which matters here because the estate does not treat origin as decoration. The labels return the drinker to the vineyards, and the cellar gives those parcels time to settle into structure.

Quiet stone, oak, and hill air

The room at Fattoria Casetto dei Mandorli has the quiet of a family winery that has not separated hospitality from work. The tasting path leads toward the cellar, not away from it. Oak barrels sit below ground, the village sits above the vineyards, and the scale remains small enough for the hand of the oenologist to feel present in the decisions. This is not a polished stage set around Romagna wine. It is a working estate with a cellar temperature, a barrel rhythm, and a view back to the slopes that feed it.

Predappio Alta gives the place its pace. The old vineyards nearby are not an accessory to the visit; they are the reason the wines exist in this form. If the estate’s next chapter is visible anywhere, it is in the same sequence Nicolucci already names: sunlight on the vines, work at the right moment, and Sangiovese resting in the underground cellars of Fattoria Casetto dei Mandorli.