Fattoria di Sammontana

Fifth generation in the vineyard

Pruning, tying, bottling, labeling: Daniele Dzieduszycki, winemaker at Fattoria di Sammontana in Montelupo Fiorentino, keeps the agricultural work close to his own hands. He works inside a family estate whose stewardship runs through the fourth and fifth generations, with day-to-day responsibility now carried by younger hands while the same name remains on the land. The property itself is older than that family line. Its Romanesque church reaches back to the 12th century, and the estate passed through Medici holdings and religious ownership before Michele Dzieduszycki bought the villa, church, furnace, and farmland in 1867. Daniele’s station is not a narrow cellar role. He works the vineyard, the bottling line, and the labels, keeping the phrase on the bottle, “Imbottigliato all’origine da Daniele Dzieduszycki,” grounded in labor rather than ornament. At Sammontana, lineage is not staged as nostalgia. It is a practical discipline: the same hillsides, the same cellar, the same family pressure to leave the farm legible to the next generation.

Concrete, amphorae, and alluvial skeleton

The estate farms approximately 13 hectares of vines and more than 3,000 olive trees on gently sloping alluvial soils between 70 and 150 meters above sea level, on the east side of the Arno valley about 20 km from Florence. The ground is stony, with gravel and pebbles known in the local technical language as skeleton, and the vineyard program follows organic and biodynamic practice. Green manure goes in after harvest, with legumes and grass sown between the rows, then cut and buried in spring to feed the soil. Before summer, the family carries out a green harvest to reduce the crop on the plant. Pruning and tying are manual, with spurred cordon in some parcels and Guyot in others. Treatments stay to sulfur and copper when needed. Harvest is by hand, beginning with white grapes and early reds, then traditional varieties, and ending with grapes for Vinsanto, left to dry on straw mats.

A cellar that lets the must move

In the cellar, red grapes ferment in large concrete tanks with indigenous yeasts, without engineered yeasts, enzymes, tannins, or other additions. The fermenting must receives pump overs, délestages, and punch downs; after fermentation, open-air racking brings oxygen into the wine and repeats over the following months, reducing the need for filtration or clarification. White grapes take a different path: soft pressing, separation from skins, a day of cold decanting, then steel tank fermentation with indigenous yeasts. Some wines move quickly to bottle. Others take time in oak, concrete, steel, or terracotta amphorae. Primo Fuoco belongs to that amphora line, a Rosso Toscano whose name stays tied to the estate rather than to a cellar trick.

The quiet weight of the estate

The room at Sammontana carries the scale of a working Tuscan fattoria rather than a polished tasting set. Underground cellars sit beside the old church and the traces of a furnace once used for pottery and terracotta, so the wine program feels close to the materials of the place: clay, stone, alluvial soil, olive wood, concrete. The estate produces approximately 40,000–50,000 bottles annually, small enough for decisions to remain bench-side. The portfolio moves through Chianti DOCG, Chianti Superiore DOCG, Rosso Toscano IGT, Bianco Toscano IGT, Rosato Toscana IGT, Vin Santo del Chianti DOCG, and olive oil, but the closing thread is still Daniele’s hand on origin. The bottle says it plainly: PRIMO FUOCO Rosso Toscano Imbottigliato all’origine.