Alessandra Moretti took over the cellar at Casa Brunello in 2019 at the age of thirty-one. She is the fourth generation at the estate. Her great-grandfather, the one who bought the hillside in 1934, lived to ninety-six. Her grandfather, the one who made the massal selection of Sangiovese grosso clones she still farms, lived to ninety-one. Her father Giancarlo, who handed her the keys, is seventy-four and has not left the property for more than a week in forty years. The pressure of the family line is something Alessandra talks about in terms of weather and geology. She does not find it dramatic. She finds it inevitable. We spoke in the tinaia in September.
The ten questions
1. What is the hardest part of your year?
Waiting for flowering. In June. I know the set determines the crop, and the crop determines the wine, and everything else is reaction. If the set is bad, I am already managing loss. If the set is good, I am spending the summer trying not to get in the way.
2. You farm 11 hectares. How many vines is that?
About 44,000. My grandfather planted most of them in 1971. We pull out about two hundred a year that have stopped producing and replace them with cuttings from the same rootstocks. In fifty years, the vineyard has been slowly replanting itself without ever being replanted.
3. What was the worst vintage you have lived through?
2003. I was fifteen. I remember my father crying in the kitchen. Forty-eight degrees for four days. The grapes were raisins before they were grapes. We picked what we could and declassified everything. My father told me that year that the 2003 was the most honest wine we had ever made because it was the wine the vintage gave us.
4. Describe your winemaking philosophy in one sentence.
Sangiovese does not lie if you do not make it. That is the sentence. Everything else is commentary.
5. Why do you still use cement and botti grandi instead of barrique?
Because the wine is already good. The wood does not need to fix it. Barrique is for winemakers who want to leave a signature on the wine. I do not want my signature. I want the hillside's.
I do not want my signature on the wine. I want the hillside's.
6. What is the biggest thing your father has taught you?
To argue with him. I did not do this until I was twenty-five. He encouraged it. He said a winemaker who does not argue with her father does not argue with the vintage, and a winemaker who does not argue with the vintage is just bottling whatever happens.
7. What wine do you drink when you are not drinking Brunello?
Jura. Puffeney when I can find it. A winemaker friend sends me the younger Overnoys. I want to drink wines that feel like they were made by one person in one place. That is the only criterion I have.
8. What is the weirdest thing about hosting a Crew?
The photographs. My father does not understand why I take so many photographs. I have told him: the Crew is thirty-four people who cannot come to the vineyard every day. The photographs are so they can. He looked at me for a long time and then he said, Ah. Like a letter to your grandmother when you were twelve.
9. What is one thing you will never do with Sangiovese?
Add acid. Extract. Fine with egg white. Use more than 20 percent new oak. Release early. Pick by numbers. I could keep going.
10. What do you want Crew members to take away from a year with you?
Not me. The hillside. I am a temporary custodian. My grandfather was temporary. My great-grandfather was temporary. If you drink my wine in twenty years and you remember the hillside and you do not remember my name, I will have done my job.
Written by
Graham Mumm
Published November 18, 2025
