Tenuta San Guido (Sassicaia)

Sassicaia is the first Italian wine from a single estate to hold a denomination of origin reserved exclusively for it, and Tenuta San Guido is the only producer listed under it. In 1978 the 1972 vintage took first place among 33 wines at a London blind tasting run by Hugh Johnson for Decanter. The estate receives no visitors, so what draws travellers is Bolgheri itself.

Tenuta San Guido does not organise guided visits to its winery or vineyards, and it does not sell its wines directly — distribution runs through its partners worldwide. No tasting room, tour or booking route is published. What is open is the country around it: the Viale dei Cipressi, five kilometres of cypresses between Bolgheri village and the Oratory of San Guido, with the Sassicaia cellar at the avenue's entrance.

Bolgheri is windy on at least 250 days a year and averages 15.5°C, about a degree cooler than other stretches of this coast, with roughly 600 millimetres of rain spread across the months. Sea breezes channelled through the Tuscan archipelago hold the heat down in summer. Harvest at Tenuta San Guido is done by hand; the estate publishes no visitor calendar, because it runs no visitor programme.

There are no walk-ins and no tours: Tenuta San Guido does not organise guided visits to the winery and vineyards. It does not sell its wines directly either — they reach buyers through its distribution partners worldwide. The estate publishes no opening hours, no tasting prices and no visitor booking route. Its registered address is Località Le Capanne 27, 57022 Bolgheri, in the province of Livorno, at the entrance of the cypress avenue where the Sassicaia cellar has stood since the mid-1970s.

Bolgheri sits on the Tuscan coast in the municipality of Castagneto Carducci, province of Livorno. The denomination runs about thirteen kilometres north to south and seven east to west, with vineyards from 10 to 380 metres, so a car is the practical way through it. The estate's cellar sits at the entrance of the Viale dei Cipressi, the five-kilometre cypress road between the Oratory of San Guido and Bolgheri village.

Tenuta San Guido is a wine estate at Bolgheri on the coast of Tuscany, in the province of Livorno, and the source of Sassicaia. Its vineyards occupy about five percent of a 2,500-hectare property that runs thirteen kilometres from hill to sea. The wine is built on Cabernet Sauvignon and carries Bolgheri Sassicaia DOC, a denomination bounded so it can be produced only on this estate. The estate does not organise visits.

Mario Incisa della Rocchetta, born in Rome in 1899 to a Piedmontese family, married Clarice della Gherardesca in 1930 and moved to the Maremma in the early 1940s. Reading the gravel and clay as a match for the Graves of Bordeaux, in 1944 he planted just over a hectare of Cabernet Sauvignon at about 400 metres at Castiglioncello di Bolgheri. The grafts came from the Dukes Salviati of Migliarino, near Pisa.

Estate soils lie between 60 and 400 metres above sea level with west and south-west exposure, partly clayey, with limestone in zones rich in alberese, gabbro and stone. Hills running from Bibbona to Castagneto block north-easterly winds while summer sea breezes cool the corridor. Vineyards take only five percent of the 2,500 hectares; 110 hectares are olive groves carrying about 11,000 adult trees.

The wine is the minority land use here. In 1959 Mario Incisa turned part of the property into the Padule di Bolgheri wildlife refuge — 80 hectares of freshwater marsh inside 440 hectares of flooded woodland, meadow and pasture, with over 250 bird species recorded. WWF formalised it, Prince Philip visited in 1965, and Mario Incisa was appointed president of the Italian WWF that same year.