Dievole, 'Novecento', Chianti Classico Riserva 2018

A truly wonderful and stunning red, this Riserva is full of flavour and texture, balance and finesse. Though there is absolutely no toasted oak used in its ageing, there is nothing lacking in this wine whatsoever. 

A deeply coloured wine, this has a beautiful perfume of red and black cherry, spice and notes of white peach and tea, leading to cocoa and leather notes. Quite incredible given that it has no toasted oak, this is a vibrant and juicy Riserva that promises a superb ageing life ahead. The body is full and the palate weight is rich with a wonderfully tense backbone of acidity that balances fine tannins, providing a long finish. I really do love good Chianti and as this enters its seventh year, it is only just starting to show how good it really will become.

Named after the 900 years of history at the estate before anyone really began making wine there (honestly, what were they doing?), this is a blend of the best selection of grapes and fermenting barrels that they source from their 150 hectares of vines used for the production of their Chianti Classico.

Fermented in concrete tanks or various shapes and sizes (an Allotment favourite, by the way), the wine ages for 17 months in huge oak barrels before bottling and a further 6 months in bottle before released to market. It is a no-nonsense wine making style that simply depends on the quality of the fruit going into it for the quality of wine coming out - a bit like data analysis. In this case, the. team in the winery can really  ask for more from the grapes by leaving them longer in the barrels, thus allowing for the specific qualities of each to show through.

This is one of the selection of very fine, potential-heavy estates owned by Argentinean Billionaire Alejandro Bulgheroni. Bought in 2012, various programmes have been executed in the decade and a bit since. Beginning with complete analysis of the vineyard's structures and potential, replanting according to the best location for each of the indigenous varieties, organic vineyard conversion (completed, with certification, in 2017) and a superb and quite radical attitude to the use of oak barrels, the winery now produces wines that are about as pure an expression of the Chianti terroir that they occupy as any other that you could imagine.

The oak use... this is very interesting. The barrels that the winery use are all very large and come from specially selected French forests and they are all very large, holding between 41 and 50 hectolitres each. They are untoasted. This means that though you will sense the familiar notes of spice aromas on the nose, they are really subtle and almost entirely dissipate on the palate, leaving wines that are really clean and, most importantly, clearly show the quality and character of the fruit from which the wines are made.

Who's behind this radical regime? A few of the brightest and most celebrated consultants going - it seems that the Bulgheroni group functions in this manner, with the identification of very fine estates and then the sourcing of the best experts available to extract the potential from each. In this case it is the extraordinary Alberto Antonini who has led the charge and the clarity that you'd find in his other consultant posts over the years - from Col d'Orcia and Antinori to Au Bon Climat, Seghesio and his own family estate in Poggiotindo - is present in each of these wines too. 

The future of Dievole is clearly very bright and will only improve with the increasing age of their vines and the unveiling of the characteristics that each vineyard site possesses.

The history of Dievole is quite incredible. The estate has ancient roots dating to 1090, but for the following 850 years or so, didn't make any wine. Its strategic positioning in Castelnuovo Berardenga meant that it occupied a key place along the politically important trade routes between Florence and Sienna. The name "Dievole" officially appeared for the first time in a contract selling the estate for "two capons, three loaves of bread, and 6 silver Lucca denari" - oh for such times... and then again the estate appears in papers kept by the noblewoman Ildegonda Camaiori where the estate was her wedding gift from her husband Count Giulio Terrosi Vagnoli in 1870s Tuscany (makes a Le Creuset pot seem rather small), and the detail is wonderful: the whole estate cost 361,632 Lira (just shy of €200 in 2025). But the most important part of the papers from a wine perspective is that they show the ledger of balances giving the information pertaining to all of the peasant families, who at the time worked each section of land-holding entrusted to them. Many descendants of those families named in the papers from the 1870s are still working and living in Chianti today.

In Italian, the English phrase "God Willing" translates as "Dio Vuole" and this is widely believed to be the manner in which the name of the Dievole estate came about: if it is God's will, the estate will...