08/30/2026
🍇 A GLASS OF HISTORY: FATTORIA DI GRATENA 🍇
In 1968, the Sieni family fell in love with a stretch of cypress-lined hills just outside Arezzo and never left. Today, Rosanna and Paolo Sieni still run the 180-hectare estate, 400 meters up in the Pieve a Maiano hills, where calcareous-clay soil gives their wines that signature minerality.
Since the mid-1990s, Gratena has farmed entirely organically hand-harvested, spontaneously fermented with native yeasts, aged in steel and old tonneaux, nothing rushed. They're so devoted to their land that in 2017 they helped resurrect Gratena Nero, an indigenous Tuscan grape variety unique to their estate. That's not just winemaking, that's stewardship.
So… why is Chianti even called Chianti? 🤔
It's one of the oldest protected wine zones on earth. Back in 1716, Grand Duke Cosimo III de' Medici drew a legal boundary around the Chianti hills — centuries before "appellation" was even a word most of us knew. To carry the name today, a wine has to come from within that historic zone and be built on Sangiovese, the thin-skinned, high-acid grape that gives Chianti its signature tart cherry snap and food-loving structure. It's a name that had to be earned — geography and grape, written into law.
That's exactly what's in your glass with Gratena's Chianti DOCG: a wine that's earned its name the old-fashioned way.
And honestly? There's so much to celebrate right now — keep the corkscrew open and dive into Chianti with us. 🍷
