The Producers Table
This is a series built around the growers, families, and estates behind the bottles. Each edition features a producer Ian Mendelsohn knows personally, has visited, and has worked alongside across a twenty-five year career in wine and spirits. These are not names on a label or bottles on a shelf. They are friends and colleagues earned through harvests, meals, and decades of shared work. What follows is not a tasting room experience. It is access built on trust.
Il Borro
I met Salvatore Ferragamo in 2005, the most junior person in a room full of hotel executives and restaurant owners. Twenty years and a lot of tastings later, that relationship is the reason a private visit to Il Borro looks nothing like a standard Tuscan itinerary.
Tuscany, Italy
Il Borro Toscana
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I met Salvatore Ferragamo in 2005, in the private dining room at the Southern Wine and Spirits headquarters in Las Vegas. It was the American launch of the Il Borro wines, and I had just taken the director job at the Mirage. I was the most junior person in that room. Hotel executives on one side, restaurant owners on the other, and me, trying to look like I belonged. Salvatore did not treat me that way. He spent time with me anyway, walked me through the wines himself, answered questions a junior buyer had no business getting real answers to. I liked the wines immediately. I liked him more.
That relationship never went cold. Whenever Salvatore came through Atlanta, we found time to taste together, picking up a conversation that never really needed restarting. I have poured and sold Il Borro continuously for twenty years since that night in Las Vegas, through every job I have held since.
We reconnected again this February at Wine Paris, twenty years after Las Vegas and a long string of Atlanta tastings in between. Salvatore asked about Vineyard Confidential, listened to the model, and asked why nobody had built this in the US already. We talked about the state of American wine, what actually moves a wine director to put a bottle on a list, and how Il Borro might expand its footprint here. Somewhere in that conversation he also solved a problem for me that had nothing to do with wine. My wife had a series of events coming up in Milan, and Salvatore connected me directly to his team at the Portrait Milano. Susan and I had stayed there the year before, and I still think about the courtyard. Open air, a summer afternoon holding on past six, a rotating list of seasonal spritz that made the heat feel like a feature instead of a problem.
Il Borro sits in the Valdarno, a fortified estate dating back to the 12th century. Ferruccio Ferragamo bought it in 1993, worn down by decades of abandonment, and rebuilt it with local labor and a commitment to eco-sustainable methods rather than importing a design name to stamp the project. Vineyards, olive groves, and gardens now cover the property, and the restoration extended into a spa built into the old stone structures, gardens that feed the estate's own kitchens as much as they please the eye, and cooking classes run where the ingredients came from the ground you are standing on that morning. None of it feels added on. It reads as one family's insistence on doing a single piece of land correctly rather than quickly.
The wines carry that same instinct. Il Borro works with international varieties alongside Sangiovese, a Tuscan estate willing to plant Syrah and Merlot next to the grape that defines the region, then let the blend argue for itself rather than lean on appellation rules to do the arguing.
A private visit to Il Borro through Vineyard Confidential is time inside a restored estate that still functions as a working village, not a museum piece roped off for tourists. You walk the property with people who know Salvatore personally, spend an afternoon in the gardens or the spa, cook a meal with ingredients grown steps from where you are standing, and taste current releases alongside library selections. That kind of access does not come from a booking form. It comes from twenty years of a relationship that started with a young wine director nobody in the room had reason to notice, and that never let a few thousand miles get in the way of sitting down together again.
From the Cellar
Il Borro is the estate's flagship, a blend built around Syrah, Merlot, and Cabernet Sauvignon with Sangiovese in support rather than in charge. Dark fruit and a structured tannin frame that ages on its own schedule, a wine built for a cellar and a decade, not a Tuesday.
Lamelle is the Chardonnay I have poured by the glass for twenty years running. Weight without heaviness, a citrus core that stays honest through the oak, the kind of white that converts guests who walk in saying they only drink red.
Polissena leads with Sangiovese and lets Merlot round the edges, a wine that stays closer to the Tuscan identity of the property while still carrying the polish that runs through everything Il Borro makes.