“Wine is art,” says Alessia Antinori as she walks me through her family’s winery, which shimmers in the Tuscan sunlight. She is vice-president of Marchesi Antinori, a family-owned business that has been making wine in the Chianti region since the 14th century. She is also the founder of the Antinori Art Project, which every two years commissions a contemporary artist to “fall in love with this place” and create a site-specific work. “We are wine producers but it’s nice to show how art is related,” she says. “It’s part of our DNA because we go back to the Renaissance.”
In 2012, the family opened Antinori nel Chianti Classico, its spectacular $110mn winery at Bargino, a village 20km south of Florence. The glass-fronted building cuts near-invisibly into the hillside. Grapes grow on the roof while, inside, huge cathedral-like caverns of casks run alongside offices and oenology laboratories. It’s more a James Bond setting than a dusty depository of barrels (though requests to use the estate as a film location are politely refused).
Alessia is one of three sisters — the first generation of women at the company’s helm — who now run this powerhouse of Italian wine. But she’s a rather low-key scion. She arrives in a beaten-up muddy Fiat hatchback, wearing a linen summer dress that wouldn’t be out of place at an English fete. We sit subterranean, literally beneath the vines.
