Meet the Maremma, Tuscany’s coast

The town of massa maritima in the maremma. photos © Patricia Thomson

Ask any American where the Maremma is and you’ll come up with a blank. Wine nerds might know it for Bolgheri, the birthplace of Sassicaia, Ornellaia, and the whole Super Tuscan category. The rest shrug.

And that’s a shame. This is a beautiful area on the Tuscan coast, which has a completely different character from the Tuscany most people know. It’s a land of sea breezes and shimmering light reflected off the Mediterranean. It’s still agricultural, though the fruit trees and grain have been replaced by vineyards in recent decades. Luckily, the ancient gnarled olive trees have been left untouched. So too the Etruscan ruins, remnants of a pre-Roman civilization that mined metal from the Apennine mountains that rise like a wall parallel to the sea. Apart from the Italians that flock to the modest beach towns in August, the Maremma remains blessedly free of tourists.

I’ve been coming to the Maremma since 2003 for our wine tours. But, like many wine travelers, I’ve spent the most of my time in the Upper Maremma around Bolgheri and Castagneto Carducci, where the most famous wineries are found. The southern side I really don’t know, except as a drive-by route from Bolgheri to Montalcino. That’s why I jumped at the chance to taste dozens of wines from this area.

The tasting was organized by the Maremma Toscana consortium and held March 15 at Gattopardo restaurant in New York. (Yes, this was my first in-person tasting since the pandemic started. Hallelujah!) It’s a newish consortium, established in 2014 after the Maremma Toscana DOC was born three years earlier, based on the former IGT of the same name. The appellation is vast, covering an area the size of New Jersey. It comprises the whole of Grosseto province, which stretches from sea level to 6,000 feet on Mt. Amiata, an extinct volcano. With 8770 hectares of vineyards over an area of 4500 km2, it’s now the third largest DOC behind Chianti Classico and Chianti. Needless to say, there’s a wide range of soil types and microclimates. And that’s reflected in the variety of grapes grown.

Among the white wines, our tasting featured vermentino, vermentino, and vermentino. And that’s fair, since this grape makes up roughly a quarter of total grape production in the DOC. It is, after all, a grape that likes to see the sea, and there’s 250 miles of coastline here. Most examples were in pure form, but a few had a splash of viognier for richness, like the excellent Le Gessaie Vermentino from Le Sode di Sant’Angelo in Massa Maritima (pictured at top).

The logo echoes the ancient lake the Romans called Prelius.

My favorite vermentino came from Castelprile-Prelius, an organic winery that takes its name from an ancient coastal lake. Their vermentino vines are planted on sandy soil just two miles from the sea. You can taste it. There’s a freshness and salinity that marks this wine, the result of constantly fanning sea breezes.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Prelius belongs to the same family as Castello di Volpaia in Chianti Classico — an excellent pedigree. It seems that Carlo and Giovannella Mascheroni Stianti, who painstaking restored the enchanting medieval borgo of Volpaia when they created that winery, bought the Prelius estate for their daughter, Federica Mascheroni Stianti, in 2007. She’s one after my heart, having worked as a painting and fresco restorer (I’m a former Renaissance art historian). How she manages to do that along with supervising this estate, I’ll never know. But the proof is in the pudding. And the pudding is very good indeed.

The logo is a play on the family name Lepri, which means rabbits

I also loved the one lone sauvignon blanc, from the organic Tenuta Montauto winery. Called Enos I Vigne Vecchie, after the grandfather Enos who planted these now-old vines in the 1980s, it’s got fantastic aromatics and a refreshing pink-grapefruit character. Following in Enos’s footsteps, grandson Riccardo Lepri also produces pasta and olive oil. They have an agriturismo too, steps from the thermal baths of Saturnia. Sounds pretty ideal to me, a glass of this sauvignon in hand with feet dangling in a thermal river.

Despite the fact that sangiovese is the dominate red grape in the Maremma DOC, making up roughly a quarter of grape production in 2020, it was relatively scarce in this tasting. Maybe they figured we already know this grape and wanted to highlight others, like ciliegiolo (featured in the seminar), alicante, cabernet, merlot, and the other French grapes, which entered the picture here in the 1990s.

The name comes a local expression, “look how the old lady dances”

Most were easy-drinking reds, ready to charm. The ones that impressed me most were all blends. San Felo’s Balla la Vecchia (from the local expression “look how the old lady dances”) was a 50/50 blend of cabernet sauvignon and merlot, done without oak. Rich with chocolate-cherry flavors and fine tannins, I wouldn’t mind this as my everyday house wine. Two other favorites were Poggio Cagnano’s Selvoso, a 60/40 ciliegiolo/merlot blend, which showed soft, plummy fruit of the woods; and Villa Pinciana’s Terraria, a 45/45/10 blend of sangiovese/cabernet sauvignon/petit verdot. Velvety smooth, it showed red-berry fruit with a touch of earthiness.

Many of these are young wineries, established in the last 20 years. More than a few were looking for U.S. importers. I hope they find them. Meanwhile, the rest of us should keep our eye on this up-and-coming region.

A Maremma seascape