Paolo Scavino

Barolo, Castiglione Falletto, Piedmont, Italy

I met Enrico Scavino at Christie's in New York in 2004 when he came to New York with his eldest daughter, Enrica, to introduce the 2000 Bric dël Fiasc. They were in town to pour it at the Wine Spectator grand tasting as they had scored it 98 points, and I had the privilege to sit down with them for a lunch and a tasting I still remember to this day.

Enrico had every reason to spend that lunch talking about the wine and that incredible the score. However, he spent it on his family, on the land his father had farmed, and on the history of Castiglione Falletto and the villages around it. He was generous with his time and his passion was infectious. That lunch was my introduction to the estate, and his love of Barolo and Piedmont has never left me.

A few years later, while I was in Las Vegas Enrica came through town and it was wonderful to talk about that lunch and enjoy some of her wines and others. In what felt like a full circle, Mattia Benevello, who runs Scavino's export, sat down with me over four 2021 Barolos in magnum.

We talked about the wine and the family, because at Scavino you cannot separate the two. Enrico was passionate about every one of the 20 crus he worked, and he made it his mission to make wine in a way that let each one show what it was. That is why every Scavino Barolo is made exactly the same way: the same fermentation, the same eight to ten days on the skins, the same large casks. Hold the cellar still, and the only thing left to taste is the ground.

Enrico also designed his own fermenter for the cru Barolos, and Mattia explained it with a teabag. An iron net holds the skins under the wine while the wine moves through them. The skins never break, so the extraction stays gentle and still goes deep.

Ravera came first. It is the family's highest vineyard, up in Novello, and thirty years ago it struggled to ripen. Warmer summers have put flesh behind its cool, herbal style, and Mattia's line on it stuck with me. Not every change is a bad change.

The second wine came with a story about loss. For 33 years the family rented a parcel of Cannubi, one of the most famous names in Barolo and the only vineyard they ever leased. In 2018 the owner died without direct heirs and the lease ended. “Carobric”, their blend of Cannubi, Rocche dell'Annunziata and Bric dël Fiasc, ended with it. That same year they bought into Bussia, in Monforte, at the highest point of the cru and the only part of it on sand. Bussia usually means power. The 2021 Vigna Fantini, its first vintage, was about lift.

Prapò is the family's corner of Serralunga d'Alba, under a hectare on a steep slope that runs off the Cerretta hill. Serralunga makes Barolo's most powerful wines. Here the exposure ripens the fruit fully, so the power arrives with flesh on it.

Bric dël Fiasc came last. It sits beside the cellar at the center of the zone, and Mattia drew a circle around it on the map, three or four kilometers wide. Cannubi, Cerequio, Brunate, Rocche dell'Annunziata, Villero, Monprivato and Rocche di Castiglione all fell inside it. The family has owned the vineyard since the estate began in 1921. In 1978 Enrico and his father bottled it alone for the first time, when most Barolo was still a blend of villages. It was the wine Enrico and Enrica carried to New York in 2004.

 Enrico died in 2024. Tasting those 2021s, I kept thinking about how proud he would be. Enrica and Elisa have worked beside him for over twenty years, and they are doing what he did. They hold the cellar to his method, they keep pushing to make better wine, and they are building something to hand to the next generation.

A private visit to Paolo Scavino is not a tasting room stop. Visits are by appointment only and built around the land, the vineyards and the table. You taste the crus side by side, all made the same way, so every difference in the glass comes from the ground. You stand at the fermenter Enrico designed and see the net that keeps the skins under the wine. Then you walk out to Bric dël Fiasc, next to the cellar, the vineyard the family has owned since 1921.

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FROM THE CELLAR

2021 Barolo Ravera, Paolo Scavino (Novello). About three hectares at 430 meters, facing east, and the last vineyard the family picks every year. Sant'Agata marl with a strong streak of limestone. Balsamic, menthol, sage and white pepper over red fruit, with cool mineral tannin and high acid. The freshness holds even in hot years, which is why demand for Ravera has climbed for fifteen years.

2021 Barolo Bussia Vigna Fantini, Paolo Scavino, (Monforte d'Alba). About 450 meters, the highest of Bussia's twelve sub zones, with vines planted between 2006 and 2010. Elisa treats the block as experimental because of the genetic mix in the vines, Nebbiolo Rosé among them. Menthol, blood orange, spearmint, dried cherry and lilac over refined, almost austere tannin.

2021 Barolo Prapò, Paolo Scavino, Nebbiolo (Serralunga d'Alba). 370 meters, facing south and southeast, replanted in 2010 with a massal selection chosen for loose clusters and low yields. Iron-rich sand over gray marl gives the wine its rusty mineral edge. Plum, licorice, dark chocolate, graphite and iron, with full Serralunga tannin. Only a handful of producers bottle Prapò.

2021 Barolo Bric dël Fiasc, Paolo Scavino, Nebbiolo (Castiglione Falletto). The family farms about a third of the small Fiasco cru, on vines planted in 1979, 1984 and 2009, where limestone and sandstone cross and iron-rich water rises from deep underground. Dark cherry, iron, dried herbs, white pepper, orange peel and geranium, with broad tannin and real perfume on top.

MV Vino Rosso, Paolo Scavino, Nebbiolo, Barbera, Dolcetto and Merlot (Piedmont). To keep the Barolos strict, the family holds back the fruit of its younger vines, and this is where that fruit goes. The blend breaks the appellation rules, so it carries the simplest label in Italy, table wine. Stainless steel only, no oak, made in tiny quantities. Red cherry, violet and spice, juicy and supple. A wine for any night of the week from the house that bottled Bric dël Fiasc in 1978.

Langhe Nebbiolo, Paolo Scavino, Nebbiolo (La Morra). Two single vineyards in La Morra, Bricco Manescotto, planted in 1960 and 1968, and Annunziata, planted in 1997. It is the one wine in the cellar made differently from the Barolos, on purpose. A cool, gentle fermentation, five days on the skins, then eight months in neutral oak. Crushed flowers, red cherry, blood orange and dried herbs over a fine, lifted tannin. It is the bottle winemakers and their teams in Barolo open on an ordinary night.

Avignonesi

Avignonesi
Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, Tuscany, Italy

The Estate

Avignonesi was founded in 1974 by the Avignonesi family who have been residents of the town since the sixteenth century. In the period that followed the winemaking was the kind that ambitious Tuscan estates did then, which was prove they could compete with international grapes and new oak. Some of their wines defined the period. However, Virginie Saverys, a Belgian attorney and trained winemaker, purchased the estate in 2009 and chose a different pat.  She immediately started the transition of the 175-hectare estate to organics and achieved certification in 2016. It was certified biodynamic in 2019 and is the largest estate of the kind in Italy.

The part that matters in the glass however, is what she did to their flagship wine Vino Nobile. The appellation lets you put thirty percent of something else in the bottle, and most producers use some of it. She took it to 100 percent Sangiovese. Tuscany sells itself to Americans in three names. Chianti, Brunello, and the Super Tuscans. Vino Nobile di Montepulciano was in the founding class of Italian DOCGs in 1980, the same year as Brunello, on a hill twenty miles east of it, but for years Vino Nobile was not regarded as highly. Vierginie was determined to change that, and I believe she has.

Vin Santo

The Vinsantaia at Avignonesi has no temperature control, and that is the entire point of it. It is a small building that is mostly height, and it is full of caratelli, fifty liter barrels sealed with wax and left alone. The room is allowed to freeze in January and cook in August because the swing is what drives the fermentation. I have been in a great many cellars. I have never been in another room that smells like that one, and Susan and I were there in the summer of 2018. I can still call it up.

We were too late in the year to see the fruit hanging. That happens earlier, whole bunches strung up in the appassitoio for three to six months until they give up half their volume, and people who have seen it describe rows of drying grapes like drapes across a room. We got the empty loft and the story. Then we got the wine, which is the part I was not prepared for.

They poured the regular Vin Santo first, which is a serious wine on its own terms. Then the export manager went and got the Occhio di Pernice, and he did not bring one bottle. He brought 1990, 1998, 2001 and 2005, in the 375s, and poured a vertical of a wine that almost nobody gets to taste twice in a lifetime, let alone four times in an afternoon. The 2005 was the current release and next to the other three it was an infant, and it was still one of the best things I have ever had in a glass. I have had Sauternes and Port going back a hundred and fifty years. I had never had a Vin Santo like that, and I had certainly never had four of them side by side.

Occhio di Pernice means eye of the partridge, which is a description of the color. It is made from Sangiovese rather than the white grapes that go into most Vin Santo, and everything about it is deliberately inefficient. The dried fruit is pressed at roughly half the weight it started at. The juice goes into the caratelli with a madre, a mother yeast the family has kept going for generations, and then it ferments for anywhere from one to four years depending on what the weather decides to do. It sits for more than a decade after that, sealed, while over half of it evaporates through the wood. What comes out is a wine of about twelve and a half percent alcohol and a couple thousand half bottles a year.

The next generation

This has always been a family affair. Virginie's son Basile was the COO and now running the estate. Eline, her daughter, opened two wine bars in London before opening another in Antwerp. She also launched the first new label of the estate called Ventisei. Ventisei is Italian for twenty six, the age she was when the first wine bar opened, from that fruit on the estate, blended to her own taste but made with the same exacting standards. The estates and people I keep going back to and support all have one or more wines like this. They have a bottle that makes the reputation, priced at what a reputation costs. What separates the ones I actually buy from the rest is the other half of the sentence. Same crew, same ground, same farming, going into a bottle you open on a Tuesday without thinking about it.

 I started drinking Ventisei not long after it appeared, and then I started programming it. I put the Rosso by the glass in Atlanta, which is the hardest test a wine at that price ever faces. It has to be good on the fourth night the bottle is open, it has to work against a kitchen sending out five different things at once, and a guest has to want a second glass. It did all three, every service, for as long as I poured it.

What a private visit is
A private visit to Avignonesi through Vineyard Confidential is the day we had, not the tasting room version of it. You walk plots at different elevations with someone who can tell you why the same Sangiovese tastes like two different grapes three hundred meters apart. You have a wonderful lunch on the terrace overlooking the Tuscan countryside and vineyards only a few feet from you.

The final part of the day is experiencing the sights and smells of the Vinsantaia, and then taste some of that magical elixir which will sear the memories in your brain forever.

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FROM THE CELLAR

The 2021 Toscana Rosso, Ventisei IGT
This is Eline's wine and an argument for restraint in a region that spent the 1990s proving it could make big wine. Sangiovese led with small parts of Merlot and Cabernet, fermented in stainless with indigenous yeast and a share of the fruit left whole, then raised in tank. Nothing touches wood. Wild strawberry, sour cherry, rosehip, low alcohol, fine tannin, a bay leaf note at the end. Serve it cool. It tastes like where it came from because nothing was added to make it taste like anywhere else.

The 2022 Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, Avignonesi DOCG
is 100 percent Sangiovese, which is the whole argument in one number. Red and black cherry over dried herb and iron, tannin that is firm without being hard, and the kind of acidity you only get off vineyards high enough to cool down at night. This is what the hill does when someone farms it properly and then gets out of the way.

1990 Vin Santo, Occhio di Pernice
This was the last glass we tried, and my reaction was almost visceral. It pours incredibly slowly and the aromas were a mix of crème brulee, molasses that lasted forever. We left the estate 30 minutes after the pour and the glass still smelled incredible. This wine belongs in any conversation about the finest dessert wine ever made.

1998 Vin Santo, Occhio di Pernice
Deep ruby to black, toffee on the nose, scents of violets and black fig and date, Incredible flavor and concentration but with the acidity to back it up.. This is just decadence defined. molten treacle toffee on the nose, enormous sugar carried by good acidity. Franco Ziliani, 16.5 of 20: dark ruby, rich and intense, warm and long, with surprising fresh fruit notes.

2001 Vin Santo, Occhio di Pernice
One of the best dessert wines I have ever had. It’s been described as a “singular work of art” and I couldn’t agree more. It’s caramel, maple syrup, espresso bean, licorice, candied fruit and dried fig, smoky and savory on the nose, and built like a tank.

2005 Vin Santo, Occhio di Pernice
Dried fig, date, molasses and caramel, hints of cardamom and cumin with astounding acidity that will keep it fresh for years.

Feudo Montoni

Feudo Montoni
Cammarata, Sicily, Italy

In the early 2010s there was a restaurant in Chelsea called Eolo: Sicilia a Tavola. The chef and owner was Melissa Muller, a New Yorker whose grandmother came from a Sicilian village of six hundred people, and who spent every childhood summer there. Eolo was purely Sicilian, down to a wine list that carried nothing else and earned a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence four years running. The dish I cannot forget is her casarecce with fava beans and fresh ricotta, twisted noodles holding tender favas, olive oil, garlic, and wild herbs, the ricotta cutting the earthy, faintly bitter edge of the beans. With that plate Melissa put a white wine in front of me I had never heard of. Catarratto, from an estate called Feudo Montoni in the island's high interior. I have been drinking it ever since.

Eolo is gone now, and the reason it closed is the best part of the story. While researching her cookbook, Sicily: The Cookbook: Recipes Rooted in Traditions, Melissa traveled the island and visited Feudo Montoni, where she met the winemaker, Fabio Sireci. She went back and forth between two lives for a while, then chose one. She married Fabio, left New York, and moved to the center of Sicily. Today she co-manages the estate's global sales and commercial work, and the two of them are in the United States often for the trade. I have been trying to cook that fava dish ever since, and with her book I get close. What I cannot reproduce is the way her kitchen served it. The chef who first put this wine in front of me now helps run the estate that makes it.

Feudo Montoni dates to 1469. Rosario Sireci bought the property in the late 1800s after discovering the wealth of ancient vines growing there, and passed it to his son Elio, who passed it to Fabio, the third generation. Fabio trained as an engineer and could have taken a career on the mainland. He came back to the farm instead and learned winemaking at his father's side. His and Melissa's two sons are the fourth generation.

The estate sits in the high interior between Palermo and Agrigento, with vineyards climbing toward 2,300 feet, fanned by winds off the Madonie and Sicani mountains. For centuries the vineyards have been surrounded by durum wheat fields that act as a natural barrier, an island within an island. The farming is certified organic and older than the certification. Nothing is fertilized. Fava beans and peas are sown between the rows to fix nitrogen in the soil, the same beans at the center of the dish that started this story. Sicily's reputation is heat, ripeness, and weight. Montoni's altitude and isolation produce the opposite: freshness, acidity, and restraint.

The Masso vineyard takes its name from the rocky, sandy, iron-rich stone it grows in. It sits at 700 meters, facing east, planted to Catarratto vines now more than fifty years old, grafted by hand onto wild rootstock in the old Sicilian manner. Catarratto is the most planted white grape on the island, concentrated in the west and mostly anonymous. Grown here, in the center, at elevation, on that iron and sand, it becomes something else entirely. This is the argument for the cru concept Fabio works by: one vineyard, one grape, bottled on its own because the ground earns it.

A private visit to Feudo Montoni is not a tasting room stop. Visits are by appointment only and built around the family's table, in the middle of an estate the Sirecis have farmed for three generations.

From The Cellar

2024  Catarratto del Masso, Feudo Montoni
This wine is a great case for why altitude and soil matter more than a grape's reputation. Citrus and mountain herbs over a saline, mineral finish, with acidity that keeps every glass asking for the next one. It is light to medium in body and completely unforced. Most Catarratto disappears into blends and bulk. This one comes off a single iron-rich vineyard at 700 meters, and you taste the address, not the variety.

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Il Borro

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.

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