OUR HISTORY
Welcome!
My name is Gabriele Succi, and the history of my winery dates back to the early 1960s, when my grandfather, Gian Battista Costa, planted our vineyards on the property belonging to my grandmother, Gabriella Archi. He focused his efforts on Romagna’s iconic grape of that era, the albana, and worked hard to achieve better recognition for what was at that time the Albana di Romagna DOC.
Following various property transfers within the family, my mother inherited a small portion of the original winery estate, and she continued to cultivate the vineyard, assisted by long-time local labourers. She sold off the grapes, though, some to the cooperative and others to various local wineries.
In the meantime, I earned a degree in Crop Sciences, in 1994, from the University of Bologna, with a thesis on a grapevine virus. A year later, I completed my military service, then immediately took up duties in my mother’s winery, planting new vineyards and purchasing new farming equipment. Although all other grapegrowers at that time were growing white grapes, I decide to go in the opposite direction, planting red varieties, in particular sangiovese. Today, I have nine sangiovese clones, and each is vinified separately, depending on the various types of wine. The other main varieties that I cultivate for my own wine production are cabernet sauvignon, merlot, ancellotta, albana, and bianchino faentino (montù).
After I carried out a number of micro-vinifications to identify the best vineyards, I began producing and marketing wine from a selection of the grapes of the 2004 harvest.
I didn’t have enough financial resources to purchase all of the equipment necessary for state-of-the-art winemaking, nor did I have the space required, since I have only the original wine cellar, which actually served as the old stables inside the farmhouse. I thus decided to carry out my winemaking following the traditional local methods, with red-wine fermentations in small 7-7.5 hectolitre containers, manual punch-downs to ensure good grape-skin contact with the fermenting must, lengthy macerations, clarification only through rackings, followed by just a light filtration before bottling, and all of these procedures without any temperature control. Cultured yeasts are used only in extreme cases, when a particular growing year has brought grapes with very high sugar levels.
The wine estate currently comprises two separate properties, “il Beneficio” and “Monte Brullo,” the latter leased, with our 13 hectares totally dedicated to vineyard. Both properties are located in Serra di Castel Bolognese, where the soils exhibit either evolved red clays or limestone-rich, more yellowish clays, known locally as “cervelli di gatto”.
All of the grapes intended for winemaking are picked by hand, and all of the vineyards are cultivated according to the principles of sustainable agriculture, to protect and respect the local environment.