Gaja

He was the first to understand that the export was the trump card for Italian wine: his products were started being offered on the U.S. market. Today he has a hundred hectares of vineyards in Piedmont, and more than two hundred in Tuscany, adding that the production Piedmont with the most famous Tuscan wines, Brunello di Montalcino in the head.

Oenologist Guido Rivella is the soul of all the wines from the Gaja family. When, in the mid-sixties, he joined the tour of great food, has an excellent array of wines. Then come the cru: the first, San Lorenzo in 1967. In 1970 Sorì Tildin and in 1978 it was the turn of Costa Russi. Today the brand means 92 hectares property carried out in full respect of nature, for a production of about 350,000 bottles a year.

Gaja Wine Awards

Precious bottles, which perfectly reflect the personality of Angelo, or rather his way of understanding the wine. He was the first to dare to innovate this wine with techniques that go after killing dizzying production per hectare (for better quality), to control fermentation temperature, the use of caps and long aging in oak barrels. There are many magazines that have talked about him as a true legend of the wine world, considering that his Barbaresco 1985 was defined by Wine Spectator "the best wine ever produced in Italy ", in 1998 the British Decanter elected him" Man of the Year "and, finally, in 2011 still American Wine Spectator honored even by their cover.

He was also awarded as Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the prestigious German magazine of reference dedicated to the business of international wine Meininger's Wine Business International, for a successful life as a man who made history, innovated, looked over and wagered bringing its wines and its name in the Olympus of world enology.

Over the years, the various members of the family worked in different activities, through to the start of the 20th century when Edoardo took over management of the estate and started to concentrate the family’s efforts on the production of top quality wines, especially Trebbiano and Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, which down to this day remain symbols of the Valentini wine family. This historic, ancient business is now led by Edoardo’s son, Francesco Paolo, who calls himself a “wine artisan”. This artisan has faithfully continued all he learnt from his father, managing, over the years, to produce the very same wine. Day after day, year after year, Francesco Paolo puts the same enthusiasm and energy into his work, saying that he is as in love with his wines as he was the very first day. The cornerstone of his management of the family business has always been to choose an artisanal method for processing the vines and the wine, respecting nature and allowing its fruits to freely emerge. This has led to the decision not to filter the wines, to use only the natural yeasts in the skins and not to control the cellar temperature.