Ampeleia: Elisabetta Foradori's Tuscan side hustle!

For Italy’s famed maven of alpine biodynamics, Elisbetta Foradori, the Ampeleia property seems at once to be both a turn away from, and a strict adherence to her roots. It is a turn in the sense that Ampeleia is located squarely in the center of Tuscany’s sunny Mediterranean coast, in the Maremma, and far from her native mountains. Though, it is easy to see this project as a sensible next stop along Foradori’s trajectory for, as in her native Trentino, she sets out with one goal: to fully express the history of the soils in which she works.

Born in 2002 of a collaboration with friends and investors Thomas Widmann and Giovanni Podini, Ampeleia consists of a number of vineyard parcels, all differing in height, aspect and soils and all focused on varietals more commonly seen along other Mediterranean coastlines: grenache, mourvedre, carignan, alicante bouschet. These are varieties whose own histories are as complicated as the histories of the people who grow them and moreover, varieties that, in capable hands, carry in them a striking sense of place.  

Shop the wines here.