2021 Petrolo Boggina C Organic Classico Riserva Val d'Arno di Sopra 750 ml

Petrolo is the superstar producer of Tuscany’s Valdarno region—and makes some of Italy’s greatest wines.

Their most famous bottle is their Galatrona, a high-end Merlot that competes with $1,000 Petrus and Masseto, but the bottle that won us over on our last visit? Their flagship Sangiovese, the single-vineyard 2021 Boggina C Classico Riserva.

This is an absolutely gorgeous wine, with explosive aromas of sun-warmed red cherries, wild strawberries, orange peel, and a mix of earth and herbs. The palate is fine-grained, minerally, and bright, like a top-shelf Brunello made with the touch of a Pinot Noir winemaker. 

Petrolo is a sprawling 672-acre mix of forest and hills, of which only 11 percent is planted to vines—the rest is kept wild to increase biodiversity. The Boggina Vineyard represents their oldest and most prized vines. 

Like the rest of their estate, Boggina is farmed organically, with the kind of attention to detail that separates the good from the truly great. The 13-acre plot was originally planted back in 1952 by Gastone Bazzocchi, the grandfather of current proprietor Luca Sanjust, who recognized early on that this particular site had something special. Over the decades, the vineyard has been carefully replanted, section by section, using massale selection—choosing cuttings from the best individual vines—to preserve the genetic diversity and character of those original plantings.

The viticulture here borders on extreme. Yields are radically restricted to just 2.5 pounds per vine, forcing the plant to concentrate everything it has into a handful of perfect clusters. It's the kind of farming that would make a Burgundian nod in approval, and that shows in every sip.

In the cellar, winemaker Simone Cuccurullo takes a traditional but exacting approach. The fruit is fermented with indigenous yeasts in glass-lined cement tanks, with an 18-day maceration and frequent manual punch-downs to extract color, flavor, and silky tannins without harshness. The wine then spends 16 to 18 months in a mix of large-format French oak. After bottling, it rests another six months before release, ensuring the wine is perfectly harmonious when it reaches your glass.