Fattoria di Valiano

Vine health before the cellar

Pasquale Presutto reads vine health before cellar work; as Technical Director and winemaker at Fattoria di Valiano in Castelnuovo Berardenga, he keeps the field and the fermenting room in the same conversation. Pasquale Presutto works inside the Piccini family’s fifth-generation Tuscan line, with Valiano serving as a Chianti Classico estate rather than a detached production address. The house traces its modern company to 1995, while the wider Piccini story reaches back 140 years to Angiolo Piccini and seven hectares of Chianti soil. Presutto’s station at Valiano is current, and his brief is broad: Estate Director, Technical Director, oenologist, vigneron. That means pruning calls, disease pressure, ripeness, fermentation and bottling do not sit in separate rooms. He has held the role since November 2017, leading the estate through organic farming and a more technical reading of each block. The working idea is plain enough to carry weight in the cellar: one grape variety, one terroir. At Valiano, that principle has to pass through Sangiovese, oak, altitude, exposure and the discipline of waiting.

Seventy five hectares under organic watch

The estate covers 230 hectares, with 75 hectares of organically managed vineyard at about 350 m elevation on southwest-facing slopes in the Chianti Classico DOCG zone. Presutto’s program begins there, in the condition of the canopy and the rhythm of inspection, before fruit reaches the cellar. Valiano has adopted the Icaro X4, a hybrid vineyard robot developed by Free Green Nature, to reduce crop-protection inputs through UV-C treatment. Presutto has described its purpose directly: “Icaro will allow us to fight fungal diseases of the vine, including downy mildew, powdery mildew, and botrytis, reducing the use of crop-protection products.” The machine maps its path, moves through the rows on electric power and uses sensors to read shifts in climatic conditions before intervention. The point is not spectacle. It is vineyard discipline, applied with a tool that lets organic work remain active rather than merely declarative. In the cellar, hand-harvested grapes move through fermentation and maturation in oak barrels, with Chianti Classico resting a further 4 to 6 months after bottling before release.

A quiet estate built around Chianti Classico

The cellar and vineyard sit in the hills of Castelnuovo Berardenga, where the room feels organized around work rather than display. Valiano’s slopes give the estate its pace: rows of vine, south-west light, the quiet pressure of the season and the cellar waiting for fruit that has already been sorted by the year. The tasting room belongs to that same register, more estate than stage. Chianti Classico is the center of the program, with 6.38 Gran Selezione and San Lazzaro Gran Selezione carrying the estate name into a narrower reading of place. Other bottles widen the bench without shifting the address: Pecchero for Cabernet Franc, Donna di Valiano for Chardonnay, and Vino in Musica, the project tied to Giuseppe Chiari. The close work remains with Presutto, the vineyard rows and the next release of Fattoria di Valiano San Lazzaro Gran Selezione.