2020 Chiara Condello Romagna Sangiovese Predappio
If you want to understand the future of Italian wine, you have to look at Chiara Condello. She is the
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Producer
Chiara Condello
I have reviewed one wine from Chiara Condello: the 2020 Chiara Condello Romagna Sangiovese Predappio (94 points).
Chiara Condello is a rising star of Emilia-Romagna and the face of a new generation in a region stepping out of Tuscany’s shadow. She works in Predappio, focused entirely on raising the reputation of Romagna Sangiovese from that subzone.
Her philosophy is “less is more”: organic farming, gravity-fed winemaking, native-yeast fermentations, extended macerations and ageing in large, neutral Slavonian oak. The vineyards are rooted in spungone, a porous ancient marine soil full of fossilised shells that acts like a sponge for water and minerals. Unlike the clay-heavy soils that often give broader wines elsewhere, it produces Sangiovese that is nervous, vertical and intensely mineral.
The Romagna Sangiovese Predappio is a liquid translation of a specific Apennine hillside rather than a fruit bomb, a precise, floral and deeply mineral wine that sheds the region’s rustic reputation and shows that Sangiovese is a Romagnolo heritage as much as a Tuscan one.