Collection: Massa Vecchia

If you're into natural wine, Massa Vecchia is a name you’ll probably know already: a small Tuscan estate with a devoted following, whose bottles turn up on the wine lists of places like Noble Rot. If not, here’s the short version. Fabrizio Niccolaini and Patrizia Bartolini founded Massa Vecchia in 1985 in the hills of the Alta Maremma, near Massa Marittima, long before “natural wine” was a category. Of the farm’s six hectares, only 3.6 are vines. The rest is olive groves and cereals.

From the start they farmed organically and kept the cellar as simple as possible: native yeasts, long macerations in open wooden vats without temperature control, ageing in old barrels, no filtration and little or no added sulphur. The result is Sangiovese with real character, earthy, savoury and alive, a world away from polished modern Tuscan reds, and the estate is now seen as one of the founding names of Italian natural wine.

If you’re new to Massa Vecchia, the Sangiovese is the place to start: their classic red, made in exactly the same spirit as everything else they do.