Tenute Folonari

Tenute Folonari truly represents a cross-section of Italian entrepreneurial life in the round, a family history that ranges from wine (the sector that made the Folonaris famous) to finance, all over the span of a century. It is told of a saga that started from Valtellina, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and reached Puglia, with important factory locations, but with its heart well rooted in Tuscany, first in Pontassieve with the famous Ruffino and then, today, from Chianti Classico to the Maremma through Montalcino and Montepulciano. Giovanni, known as Nino, an engineer born in 1899, undoubtedly wrote the most important pages in the long saga of the Folonari family. It was he who pushed for the introduction in Italy, in the early Sixties, of the institution of wine denominations, to way of the AOC beyond the Alps, but also to believe in the format of the bottle (of wine) for the daily consumption of Italians, at the time drunk only in bulk, sold in demijohns and considered solely as a food (and not a hedonistic pleasure, as today it is interpreted). It was he again who believed in the post-war restart of the historic Ruffino winery, purchased by his father in 1927; the Engineer invented a new entrepreneurial route, relaunching the wine factories in Puglia, in Barletta, Sansevero and Locorotondo, and with the first millions obtained from the sale of the "Lacrima d'Oro", the sweet wine preferred by Americans and due to the the ingenuity of the oenologist Tito Juffmann also restarted Ruffino di Pontassieve. In the year 2000, after more than a century of family collaboration, succeeded from generation to generation, the Folonari family made the decision to separate and follow separate projects, rationalizing the activities. Ambrogio leaves Ruffino and the rest of the family to create, with his son Giovanni, a winery with a strong family character, with the two hundred hectares of Tenute Folonari where 1 and a half million bottles are produced per year, where the winemakers "put their face to it" and work the complete chain from the vineyard to the grapes up to the wine, the latter with a strong identity, in which the hand of the oenologist never prevails, but rather the profound characteristics of the terroir, or rather of the territory and of the land, of course, but also of the tradition and the people who work there. This is the spirit of the Folonari brand today.