We review the full range from the cult Tuscan winery behind the Caberlot grape which does not officially exist – Podere Il Carnasciale Il Caberlot, Il Carnasciale, Ottantadue Sangiovese, Blanc'21 

 

 

Podere Il Carnasciale sits high in the Valdarno, east of Chianti Classico and north of Arezzo, through an unmade track that winds by the neighbouring Petrolo estate up on a quiet hilltop estate. Its reputation was built not on acreage or architectural grandeur, but on one of the boldest acts of faith in modern Italian wine: betting a life’s work on a grape nobody else grows.

The estate’s cult wine is called Il Caberlot, and it occupies a strange place in the imagination of people who follow Italian wine closely. The late Master of Wine Nicolas Belfrage called it "the most famous cult wine you've probably never heard of." It is produced in tiny quantities, just about three and four thousand magnums in a good year.

 

(Source: Podere Il Carnasciale / Il Caberlot)

 

The grape it is made from grows in only one place on earth: these few hillside plots. And here is the part that gets better: the variety, Caberlot, does not appear in any official register of grape varieties. The Valdarno di Sopra DOC recognises Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Sangiovese and a list of other varieties, but not Caberlot. On paper, in the eyes of the bureaucracy that governs what may be written on the wine label, Caberlot does not exist. And because Caberlot is unrecognised, the wine cannot carry the local appellation. It is sold, at considerable prices, as the basic IGT Toscana.

 

 

Last month, I had the chance to sit in on a tasting seminar that Moritz Rogosky, who owns the estate today, gave at Praelum Wine Bistro. It was the family’s first time pouring the wines in Singapore, and over the better part of an afternoon he worked through five of them, from the Sangiovese Ottantadue to the estate’s new white, while sharing with us the story behind each label.

The adman who wanted to disappear into an olive grove

Il Caberlot was the idea of German advertising veteran Wolf Rogosky and his wife Bettina. According to sources, Wolf was an accomplished adman who worked for the famous agency Gerstner, Gredinger and Kutter in Düsseldorf, and was behind some of the more successful European campaigns of his day (he helped design the rounded VAG lettering later adopted by Volkswagen). This connection to the creative world matters more than it might seem, and we will come back to it, because the estate that grew out of his retirement project is a piece of imaginative brand-building.

 

(Source: Ideenstadt Düsseldorf)

 

After several decades as an advertising director, in 1972 Wolf decided to look for a small piece of Tuscany for his retirement project. Wolf and Bettina drove up the Tuscan slopes in search of a place where the phones did not ring and the post struggled to arrive. They found an old house in the middle of a wood with no access road, no electricity, and only a footpath to reach it, and decided that it was exactly right. The property, Il Carnasciale, sat in the hills near Mercatale, a few hundred metres from Petrolo, with less than half a hectare of land planted to olive trees. The quiet suited Wolf. He wanted somewhere to hide from the noise of his working life. He bought a hill and a few hundred olive trees and, for a while, that was that. No grape vine or winery was seriously planned.

Then came a frost that presented an unexpected opportunity. In the winter of 1985, a hard freeze ran through these hills and killed the olive groves. The Rogoskys had wanted to plant a vineyard for some time but could not get a permit to remove the existing olives. The elements disposed of man’s regulations and destroyed the olives anyway. The Tuscan regional authorities later allowed growers who had suffered frost damage to convert ruined olive ground to vines.

 

(Source: Podere Il Carnasciale / Il Caberlot)

 

Then came the question that defines the estate. What to plant? Plant Sangiovese, like everyone else in Tuscany, and you are competing against families with centuries of head start. Plant a fashionable international variety, Cabernet or Merlot, and you are turning your back on the place itself in favour of grapes that belong somewhere else. Wolf, by several accounts a creative man, wanted a third road. If only he could have a wine that would invite no direct comparison with anything, just like the impression the Super Tuscans (made with French grapes) did when they showed up. For an adman in the 1980s, the Super Tuscan headlines were fresh on his mind.

The grape that isn't in the book

Founder Wolf Rogosky with respected Italian agronomist Remigio Bordini.

 

The third road already existed, as it happened, in the form of a vine almost nobody knew existed. Some decades earlier in the 1960s, the agronomist Remigio Bordini came across an unusual grape in an abandoned vineyard in the Colli Euganei, the Euganean Hills near Padua in the Veneto. The vine looked and behaved like a cross between Cabernet Franc and Merlot. It carried, as the estate puts it, the aromatic, organoleptic signature of Cabernet Franc, while its physical, ampelographic profile sat closer to Merlot (in plain terms, the grape smells and tastes like Cabernet Franc, while the vine itself looks more like Merlot, ampelography being the practice of identifying a vine by the shape of its leaves and bunches), which led Bordini and later the Rogoskys to assume it was a natural, spontaneous crossing of the two. It had a name that gave nothing away: L32, a nursery registration code in Bordini’s study materials.

 

The renowned Il Cibrèo restaurant in Florence that led Wolf Rogosky down the path to Caberlot (Source: Michelin)

 

Over dinner at a restaurant in Florence, Wolf tasted a wine made by Vittorio Fiore, a respected consultant winemaker. Thoroughly impressed, Wolf invited Fiore to be the project's first winemaker. Fiore in turn knew Bordini and introduced Wolf to the agronomist and his strange L32 vine that might be of interest. Bordini agreed to let them plant it.

 

(Source: Podere Il Carnasciale / Il Caberlot)

 

Wolf, the copywriter, did the naming. He took L32 and rechristened it “Caberlot”, born of Cabernet and Merlot, a natural marriage of two noble Bordeaux grapes. The first vineyard went into the old olive ground around 1986, on a south-east facing slope where only the top twenty centimetres of soil are the friable galestro (galestro is a crumbly, flaky schist) typical of Tuscany, with rock beneath. It was small, roughly a third of a hectare, and it was planted at a density that was startling for its time. Fiore's advice was to pack in around 10,000 to 11,000 vines per hectare and to prune each plant down to a mere five bunches, forcing low yields and concentration. The original parcel was trained as gobelet, the low free-standing bush form, which suits a low-vigour variety like Caberlot.

To bring the new vineyard luck, the Rogoskys decided to mark the moment by interring a bottle of Italy's most famous cult red beneath the roots Wolf buried a bottle of Sassicaia, the original Super Tuscan and the most romantic icon available to them, under the first vine they planted.

The haute couture winery with X-marks, Magnums, and the beauty of not knowing

The maiden vintage came in 1988. But as the home vines were too young that first year, so the 1988 Caberlot was made largely from fruit grown in Bordini's own experimental nursery, then vinified and aged at Podere Il Carnasciale. Only 350 magnums were produced in 1988, and the grapes were crushed by foot, by Bettina herself. From a frost, a borrowed nursery vine and a few hundred hand-crushed bottles, a legend started to assemble. Moritz tells us that he still has a few of those first bottles made from Bordini’s three nursery rows rather than the Rogosky vineyard. Five magnums of the 1988 survive in the family cellar and the wine is holding up today.

 

 

Three decisions from those early years still define Il Carnasciale’s identity as a “haute couture” winery to many an importer.

The first is none other than the prominent hand-painted X-mark that adorns every vintage of Caberlot. Moritz filled us in on where this mark came from. Each member of the family had a hand in deciding on the X-mark. The first idea to represent, Moritz said, was the crossing itself, the meeting point of two grape varieties. The young Moritz also contributed a clever idea of his own when the labels were being designed. “Let’s make something you can notice right away, that you can identify from far away.” In Italian restaurants, wine bottles stood upright on shelves, so a label that bore a very prominent mark would immediately be recognised across the room. The idea of the X-mark stuck. A painter friend of his parents immediately drew about a hundred of those X’s in ink, using a brush he had made from straw and grass found on the property. Each vintage then takes its own colour and its own X, chosen to suit the year: a stronger, more emphatic mark for a warm, structured vintage, a lighter and more transparent one for a cooler or trickier season. The idea is that no two vintages will ever be exactly the same, anyway. It’s also said that a sufficiently attentive collector can even read the character of the year off the shape of the mark.

 

(Source: Podere Il Carnasciale / Il Caberlot)

 

The second is the idea of keeping a little mystery. You’ll recall that when the agronomist Remigio Bordini came across a mystery grape that smelt like a Cabernet Franc, and grew like a Merlot, the technology did not yet exist to determine the genetic lineage of the grape. All he could do was to make a very educated guess that L32 was a cross between Cabernet Franc and Merlot. Many years later, an offer came from José Vouillamoz, the Swiss grape geneticist and co-author of Wine Grapes, who said he could run the analysis if the family prepared and sent him samples. The Rogoskys prepared the samples, then sat down as a family and decided not to send them. “Do we really need to know?” The family decided to keep the mystery, keep the story, keep a little uncertainty, said Moritz to me with a smirk. He noted that Caberlot today does get a passing mention in Wine Grapes, but tucked into the Merlot chapter.

 

 

The not-knowing is now part of the product. It scarcely matters what Caberlot turns out to be, since the results are what the wines are, and the variety is unlikely to be some genuinely unknown novelty in any case. The Rogoskys have decided that the question is more valuable unanswered, which is either a piece of philosophical confidence or the single best marketing instinct in modern Tuscan wine, and possibly both!

The third is the magnum. Il Caberlot was originally released almost only in the 1.5-litre format. The estate later added a small run of 75cl bottles for restaurants from 2013, which Moritz christened "demi-magnums" and which now carry the word "Sommelleria" on the label. Otherwise, if you want Caberlot, you buy a magnum, a format that ages slowly and majestically but commits you to opening a lot of wine at once. It is a choice that limits the audience to people who collect, cellar and entertain at a certain scale, which is to say it is a piece of positioning as much as a winemaking decision.

All of this sits under the image of Il Carnascale as a "haute couture" winery. A winery with an obsessive, hand-built, made-to-measure care that goes into a modest output. The phrase lands with a particular irony when you know that Moritz once worked in high fashion before joining the family estate – more on that later.

The region in which Il Carnasciale sits, and the company it keeps

The estate lies in the Valdarno di Sopra, the upper valley of the Arno, in the province of Arezzo, roughly sixty kilometres south of Florence and a little north of Siena and Arezzo. The area has a long pedigree.

 

The iconic balze - eroded clay-and-sandstone formations unique to the Valdarno (Source: Discover Arezzo)

 

The 1716 edict of Cosimo III de' Medici, the "Bando sopra la Dichiarazione dé Confini," named four Tuscan zones as producers of the highest quality wine: Chianti, Pomino, Carmignano, and Val d'Arno di Sopra. That makes the Valdarno one of the oldest delimited fine-wine areas anywhere, older than the concept of appellation as we now use it. Before that, there was an even earlier mention, a 1427 Florentine registry that commended Val d'Arno di Sopra’s potential. Ironically the modern denomination is young and small. The Valdarno di Sopra became a DOC only in 2011, by ministerial decree, having previously been lumped in with the broader Chianti and Colli Aretini designations, and the vineyard area inside it is tiny, under a hundred hectares by some counts.

Yet this is a corner of Tuscany where small estates with outsized fame chase single-vineyard precision. The producer whose land you drive across to reach Il Carnasciale, Petrolo, makes Galatrona, a pure Merlot so admired it has been nicknamed the Pétrus of Italy. Down the road sit Tenuta Sette Ponti, whose Vigna dell'Impero comes off Sangiovese vines planted in 1935, and Il Borro, the vast estate owned by the Ferragamo family.

 

(Source: Podere Il Carnasciale / Il Caberlot)

 

So is Il Caberlot a Super Tuscan? By the loosest definition, a high-priced, ambitious Tuscan red built on French rather than native grapes and sold outside the traditional appellations as IGT, it fits the template exactly, and importers routinely file it under the Super Tuscan heading. By a stylistic reading, it is something else entirely. The classic Super Tuscans, Sassicaia, Ornellaia, Tignanello, were made from named, established Bordeaux varieties grown at scale. Il Caberlot is made from a singular vine that exists nowhere else, in quantities of only a few thousand bottles. So while the parents of Caberlot may have arrived from elsewhere, but after four decades on the Tuscan hill it has been, some argue that the wine is as Italian as the Rogosky family who planted it. Caberlot is a child of immigrants that has become a local.

From a Florence restaurant to a global waiting list

For its first decade and more, Il Caberlot was barely a commercial product at all. While the first vintage was 1988, substantial commercialisation only began in the early 1990s. The wine existed for American collectors "in name only" until about 2005, and that allocations went to a handful of restaurants: Il Cibrèo in Florence (the same restaurant where Wolf Rogosky came to know Vittorio Fiore), three-star establishments in Paris, and the members of Florence's Teatro del Sale, who were entitled to buy a single magnum a year as a privilege handed down through families. This was distribution as membership, not as sales.

 

(Source: Podere Il Carnasciale / Il Caberlot)

 

The reputation was built on the ground, and then in print. The estate's defining set-piece event came in early 2014, when the family staged a vertical of twenty vintages, from 1988 to 2010, at the Teatro del Sale across the street from Il Cibrèo. Sixty-four tasters came from around the world, each place set with twenty glasses and one of Bettina's hand-inscribed notebooks. Bordini and Fiore stood up to recall their first encounters with the vine. In the difficult, wet 2002, Moritz pointed out a note of cannabis in the glass, and the room agreed. It is hard to imagine a better advertisement for a wine than a roomful of journalists and importers, in a converted theatre, working through a quarter-century of a grape that does not officially exist.

From the mid-2000s the wine went properly international, carried by specialist importers who trade on rarity in North America and Europe. Prices reflect the scarcity. According to Moritz, the estate now makes something like 20,000 bottles a year across all its wines and ships to about thirty countries. The critical scores climbed in parallel from Antonio Galloni's steady stream of mid-to-high-90s through the 2010s to the high watermark of a full score in 2018. The 2018 vintage of the Il Caberlot turned critical admiration into a perfect score. In Galloni’s review, he reached for the comparison that has followed the wine ever since: “Imagine Cheval Blanc, but with a good dose of Tuscan sun.” Other critics too weighed in positively.

Winemaking at Il Carnasciale

Strip away the romance and Il Carnasciale is a winery of an almost fanatically lot-by-lot way of working.

Start in the vineyard. The estate now farms roughly close to six hectares across six separate plots, planted from the mid-1980s onwards through 1999, 2004 and the early 2010s. Moritz shared with us that the family had recently bought a further plot of about 4.8 hectares near Mercatale, long-farmed organic Sangiovese, and is grafting parts of it over to Caberlot, Cabernet and Syrah while keeping some of the Sangiovese. The plots are scattered within about a twenty-kilometre radius of the cellar, on different soils and different heights. The original Carnasciale Caberlot parcel sits high, around 450 metres, a height that Moritz says the family has decided not to go any higher. The newer plots lie much lower on limestone soils with chalk and sand. One parcel sits on strongly sandy ground over limestone and sandstone laid down where an ancient salt lake once stood. The training systems vary by site and by intent, from the old gobelet of the first vineyard to guyot and spurred cordon (guyot and cordon are two common ways of pruning and training vines along a wire, as against the free-standing gobelet bush) on the younger plots, all chosen, the estate says, to coax low yields and concentration from a vine that is naturally low in vigour and prone to disease. Everything in the vineyard is done by hand, with no chemical fertilisers, herbicides or pesticides, and any treatments kept organic.

 

(Source: Podere Il Carnasciale / Il Caberlot)

 

Picking runs over roughly three weeks, parcel by parcel and day by day, and the grapes are sorted by hand on the rule that, as the estate phrases it, the grape you would not be willing to put in your own mouth does not go into the crate. The fruit comes in to the cellar in small fifteen-kilo cases. There are up to forty or more distinctive lots in a vintage.

In the cellar the method is deliberately gentle and deliberately slow. The grapes are de-stemmed and fermented separately, lot by lot and harvest-day by harvest-day, in small stainless steel vats (the estate works in vessels of around eight to ten hectolitres), at controlled temperatures kept below roughly 28 to 29 degrees so as not to cook out the aromatics. Twice a day the cap is punched down by hand, with a wooden cross-shaped tool, partly to extract gently and partly so that the team can feel how each fermentation is progressing. The watchword is restraint: the aim is to never over-extract. Sulphur is kept to a minimum, and the malolactic fermentation happens naturally in barrel to soften the acidity.

 

(Source: Podere Il Carnasciale / Il Caberlot)

 

Then the oak. The wine goes into French barriques of low toast, sourced to suit each lot. About 50-70% new wood, roughly two-thirds Tronçais and one-third Allier and Vosges, with blonde to medium toast, the barrels kept in wood for around 22 months with a single racking. Most of the casks come from Burgundy coopers, which has obliged the estate to build privileged relationships with a few top barrel-makers willing to deliver wood at the last minute. A recent headline change is the arrival of large-format casks. Since around 2019, the estate has matured certain selections, in particular the youngest plots and the second wine, in a 40-hectolitre foudre which stands many times the size of a standard barrel, giving gentler oxygen exposure and far less oak flavour. This foudre was built by the cooper Marc Grenier in Burgundy. This is perhaps a move away from the all-barrique regime of the early decades and towards a gentler, less overtly oaky frame. Older notes appear to describe an 18-month barrique ageing followed by 16 months in bottle though the current figures run longer.

 

(Source: Podere Il Carnasciale / Il Caberlot)

 

Then comes the tasting and evaluation. After the first ageing, usually around May, every lot is tasted blind. The barrels judged most structured, complex and age-worthy are blended into Il Caberlot; the rest become the second wine. Because the assemblage is decided each year on merit, the make-up of the grand vin changes from vintage to vintage, and so do the quantities. In a great year more wine is good enough for Il Caberlot and less is left for the second label, and in a difficult year the reverse. The selected Caberlot is bottled unfined and unfiltered and then rests in magnum for a further sixteen months or so before release, so that the wine reaches the market already a couple of years into its life.

Up until the 2018 vintage, the second wine was made exactly like the first and only separated out at the blind tasting. From 2019 the second wine has been made separately from a selection of younger vineyards aged in larger barrels.

Ongoing experiments

Moritz has been restless in the cellar, and he walked us through a couple of fascinating experiments still in progress. The reds were once aged in all-new barrels; the estate has since pulled back, having found that some barrels give a better result the second time they are used, and it now keeps a few larger casks as well. From the 2024 and 2025 vintages he has been working with a fermentation tank designed by a food and wine science professor at the University of Florence, built to capture the aromatic compounds that normally escape as gas during fermentation, turn them back into liquid form, and to let the winemaker taste what is being lost. Italian law currently forbids adding anything back to a fermenting wine, so for now the estate is running side-by-side comparisons, with and without the recaptured aromatics. Moritz has also put a small lot of the 2025, about eight hectolitres, into neutral stainless steel rather than wood, to see whether a more neutral component might earn a place in the blend.

The people on the hill now

Wolf Rogosky passed away in 1996. What he left behind is now run by his wife, his son, Moritz, and his granddaughter, with a small technical team.

Bettina Rogosky, Moritz’s mother, is the constant. She has been involved since the beginning, crushed the first vintage with her feet, and still numbers every bottle by hand while keeping a notebook recording the customers who received the allocation. Bettina is currently 82 years old, same as the house number of Podere Il Carnasciale and the number that gave the estate’s Sangiovese its name.

 

 

Moritz, who leads and runs the estate today, speaks several languages and has had an interesting career path. Before wine, he was a couturier in Paris, a fashion designer, which truly adds to the family's "haute couture" image. 

 

 

Moritz's daughter Carla-Elle Rogosky, or Elle, is the third generation, increasingly present at tastings and events. She also writes about wine and divides her time between Paris and the estate.

 

 

The winemaking itself is now in the hands of Marco Maffei, who carries the title of oenologist and technical director and has had full-time charge of the viticulture and winemaking for about 15 years. Behind Maffei stand the two foundational consultants who have never quite left. A long-time family friend is Peter Schilling, a German-born Italian winemaker with a deep background making wine in Burgundy, who has been a winemaking consultant. Remigio Bordini, the agronomist who found the grape in the first place, stays on as advisor.

Wine is not the only thing the hill makes. The frost that started the story killed the olive groves, but the estate now farms about 450 olive trees today, and Moritz is plainly proud of the olive oil. The family co-owns a small mill, shared with Petrolo and a few other growers, run on a strict rule that olives are pressed the same day they are picked. Further off, Moritz kindly shared that there is a new winery on the drawing board set on the far side of the vineyards, with a cellar below and a tasting room above, meant to put a little distance between the working winery and the old family house.

 

The wines of Il Carnasciale

The Il Caberlot, the grand vin (IGT Toscana, 100% Caberlot) is the wine the whole estate exists to make, assembled each year from the best lots, bottled unfined and unfiltered, and released in magnum and demi-magnum after extended ageing.

 

 

The wine is admired for a backbone of acidity, and for a savoury, herbal, peppery character that is recognisably its own. Moritz describes the style of Caberlot as never a big or powerful wine, it comes out lean and energetic, a function of the cool site and a winemaking that tries not to over-extract. The tannins sit at the heart of the wine and drive it forward. With age the fruit settles and notes of spice, pepper and dried flowers come up. While typically bottled as magnums, for restaurants, the estate also bottles a 75cl "Sommelleria" version of the grand vin.

Also bearing the iconic X-mark is the second wine, Carnasciale (IGT Toscana, 100% Caberlot). Introduced in 2000, Carnasciale is also pure Caberlot, made historically from the lots that did not make the grand vin, and now, since 2019, made as a wine in its own right from start to finish from younger vines, and is built to drink earlier than the Il Caberlot.

 

 

While it was previously made the same way as the Il Caberlot, since the move to a 40-hectolitre Burgundian foudre, the second wine has taken on a slightly rounder, less barrique-driven shape. Two quirks of the recent vintages came up during our seminar. There was no 2023 Carnasciale at all: a bad outbreak of mildew that hit much of Italy that year cut yields so hard that Moritz had only enough good wine for Il Caberlot and nothing left over to draw a second wine from. To fill the gap he made two bottlings of the 2022, the standard Botte Grande and a Botte Grande Plus, the one poured at the tasting, which spent thirty months in the foudre rather than twenty-two before its six months in bottle.

The Ottantadue (Valdarno di Sopra DOC, 100% Sangiovese) is the estate's one wine that can actually carry the local appellation, because Sangiovese, unlike Caberlot, is a recognised local variety. First made around 2016, it comes off a Sangiovese plot of just over a hectare planted in 2004, is fermented in cement and aged for around fourteen months in stainless steel rather than oak, and is deliberately not a Chianti lookalike.

 

 

In an interview, Maffei explained the thinking with a nice symmetry: when Wolf started Il Caberlot he wanted a wine completely unlike anything the area made, and with Ottantadue the team took the same bet on Sangiovese, aiming for a different kind of Sangiovese rather than a conventional one. The result is something that reads Beaujolais: bright cherry and raspberry, fresh herbs, a graphite-and-carbon mineral edge, moderate extraction and smooth tannin, a wine of easy approach but of character.

The Ottantadue name is a playful one which literally means "eighty-two," but simply refers to the house number of Podere Il Carnasciale, except that there are in fact no house numbers before or after the winery on the road.

 

(Source: Podere Il Carnasciale / Il Caberlot)

 

Moritz initially toyed with making Ottantadue a blend of 82% Sangiovese and 18% Caberlot, to echo the number, but his team talked him out of it: Caberlot is too precious, and the estate does not wish to blend it with anything. He chose a clear glass bottle on purpose, as a signal that this is not a conventional, put-it-away-for-a-decade Sangiovese, and he likes to serve it lightly chilled, which he says lifts the fruit. The large figure on the label, a graphic character that looks something between a chess piece and a family crest, has actually appeared in miniature on all of the other Caberlot bottles since the beginning; for Ottantadue, Moritz said, it finally got its big day, pushed to the centre with a horizontal red line cutting across it so that, as one taster joked, the figure looks up to its nose in wine. When asked about the story behind this label, Moritz happily admits the character has no name and no story, and was added to Il Caberlot labels because a label with a huge “X” without any human presence felt too imbalanced. “He doesn’t really exist,” said Moritz breezily, before offering to invent a backstory on the spot about him being a distant Tuscan cousin.

Finally there’s also the Blanc 21 (80% Assyrtiko, 20% Trebbiano). The estate's recent unexpected move into growing white wine, and specifically into Assyrtiko, the great white grape of Santorini, which has no deep Tuscan tradition. Assyrtiko was grafted in 2019 and was first bottled in 2021. For now the wine is called simply Blanc. The wine spent about two years on its lees in a ceramic tanks, then a further two years in bottle, so it reaches the market with a little age. And it carries the same paperwork joke as the Caberlot wines, whose vines have to be declared as Cabernet Franc. The Assyrtiko vine is declared as Vernaccino, because Assyrtiko officially cannot be planted in Italy at all (the workaround is to register the vine as a permitted lookalike on the approved local list).

 

 

What is documented is the intent, which is pure Carnasciale. Assyrtiko is prized for searing acidity, salinity and an ability to hold freshness in heat. A blend that pairs it with Tuscan Trebbiano reads as another bet on a grape that belongs somewhere else, planted in defiance of local convention, exactly the logic that produced Caberlot in the first place. Forty years after a Wolf Rogosky decided to ignore convention and plant Caberlot grapes, his granddaughter's generation is planting a Greek grape instead. The estate, whatever else it is, remains consistent.

An estate led by pure imagination

 

(Source: Podere Il Carnasciale / Il Caberlot)

 

Stand back from the high critic scores and the scarcity and the Cheval Blanc comparisons – the thing that lingers about Podere Il Carnasciale is the amount of pure imagination. An advertising man dreamed up a wine from a grape nobody could name, coined the name himself, and dressed it in a hand-painted X that looks more modernist than wine label-y. Wolf Rogosky’s family has kept imagining ever since: a Greek grape planted in Chianti’s backyard, a son who came to wine by way of fashion, a question over the vine’s parentage left open because a question that keeps you wondering is better than a singular answer.

 

(Source: Podere Il Carnasciale / Il Caberlot)

 

For all the seriousness in the glass and the wine trade, the family wears its cult very lightly. You hear it in the way Moritz talks too. Ask him about the figure on his family crest and he will tell you, cheerfully, that there is no real story, then offer to make one up on the spot. Somewhere beneath the estate’s oldest vines, a buried bottle of Sassicaia is slowly turning to nothing, its work done.

Wine Review: Ottantadue, Podere Il Carnasciale

2023 vintage, 100% Sangiovese, 14 months of ageing in stainless steel.

 

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Deep garnet.

Nose: Ripe and rich on red fruits, with a wild funk running underneath. It reminds me of a raspberry lambic ale (think Cantillon) with that bretty, faintly feral funk, a little CO2 prickle, and a touch of freshly tilled soil. The fruit leads with pomegranate and raspberry, dark cherry and blackcurrant sitting just behind. A green, stemmy thread runs through it, a touch grassy. Animal hide and fur give it a rustic edge, and right at the top a wisp of potpourri.

Palate: Medium-bodied and smooth, with really fine tannins that are almost powdery. It feels balanced and rounded, well defined fruits and bright acidity keeping it lively. The fruit runs darker here than on the nose, dark cherry and black cherry, pomegranate and blackcurrant, with cranberry and wild raspberry tucked in around them. Then the savoury side takes over: animal hide and fur, a bit of leather, gamey jerky, a salty undertow. Soil and a rustic, grassy character sit beneath it all, and a twist of black pepper spice on the back end.

Finish: Medium length. Creamy and still berry-ed on the close, almost a cherry-cream note, the tannins turning lightly grippy and grainy. The gamey, meaty side carries through, salty and savoury, with something close to salted ham. Cranberry and dark cherry keep the fruit going alongside the leather and a last grassy edge. It finishes clean and dry.

My Thoughts:

What strikes me most is how immediate and pure the fruit is. It feels like a Chianti and a Belgian lambic made a baby. The fruit comes through unmediated and free of any oak gloss, then with some layers of wild, bretty funk sitting on top of all the clean fruit. There’s a fair amount going on for a wine this approachable: pure red and dark fruit on one side, a savoury, gamey, almost cured-meat character on the other, held together by fine tannin and bright acidity. It is highly drinkable, refreshing and appetising.

Wine Review: Carnasciale, Podere Il Carnasciale

2022 vintage, 100% Caberlot, Botte Grande Plus, aged thirty months in the foudre.

 

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Dark ruby.

Nose: Heavily perfumed and glossy fruits. A cool, velvety, plush texture, almost polished. Purple florals lead the way, lavender and roses, rose petal and iris, backed by patchouli and sandalwood for an exotic, resinous depth, with sarsaparilla and angelica threading through. The fruit sits darker underneath: plums, dark cherry, pomegranate and wild raspberry then a rustic, savoury edge, animal hide and fur, something faintly meaty, a touch of balsamic. There's also a classic Cab Franc green bell pepper aroma.

Palate: Medium-bodied but substantial and polished. Concentration hits first, dark cherry and cranberry at the centre, with patchouli, iris and rose petal carrying the floral side onto the palate. It's plush and lively, then turns zestier and more spiced the longer it sits, a little cardamom, dried thyme, a herbaceous lift. The tannins come across grainy and lightly grippy, the acidity bright and pointed. Underneath runs a chalky, inky, faintly saline streak that keeps it lean and energetic rather than weighty, and a meaty savouriness ties it back to the nose.

Finish: Long, and floral right to the end, iris and rose petal holding on next to dark cherry, pomegranate and wild raspberry. Balsamic and dried herb give it a savoury close. The tannins stay grainy and lightly grippy, and it finishes clean and dry, an inky note trailing off last.

My Thoughts:

Rich, complex and, frankly, very impressive, and to think this is the estate's second label! The perfume is the headline, all those purple florals and resinous, exotic notes, but it never tips into being merely pretty, because a savoury, meaty, rustic streak holds it down and the structure underneath is serious: fine grainy tannin, bright pointed acidity, that chalky inky mineral spine. It also moves in the glass, opening plush and floral before turning zestier and more spiced. This is really whole and complete.

Wine Review: Il Caberlot 2021, Podere Il Carnasciale

2021 vintage, 100% Caberlot, 18 months of ageing in french barrels (new around 50%), Demi-Magnum Sommelleria edition

 

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Dark ruby.

Nose: Layered and full of nuance, herbaceous and spiced, with a plush, slick, velvety feel running through the whole thing. Iris and sandalwood give it a perfumed, exotic lift. Underneath sits a backbone of concentrated red berries, joined by supple plum, dark cherry, blackcurrant and blackberry, with a tart edge of hawthorn. A rustic, savoury thread once again: animal hide and fur, new leather, a bit of gamey meat, and a wild, faintly feral funk. Clay and a certain slickness ground it, while softer top notes drift over the top, light vanilla, a touch of balsamic, a dusting of cardamom.

Palate: Medium-bodied and structured, but the incredibly tannins are the headline. It's lean and concentrated with acidity gentle but bright. Fruit leads, red cherries and plums, dark cherry, blackberry and blackcurrant, with wild raspberry around the edges and a touch of balsamic. Give it time in the glass and it shifts, turning spicier and showing slight oak tones, vanilla and cardamom, iris, a note of apple balsamic, dried herb. It gradually grows richer and rounder as it opens, leather and animal hide filling in behind the fruit.

Finish: Medium plus length. Clean and dry. A soft, creamy lactic edge on the close, an almost malolactic softness. Dark cherry and hawthorn carry the fruit through. The tannins turn lightly grainy and grippy, a cool mineral-spring freshness runs beneath, a last touch of cardamom.

My Thoughts:

Supple, structured, elegant and really fine. More concentrated primary fruit than I expected with the vanilla and oak not yet folded all the way in. The tannins are just incredibly fine, giving the wine its structure without any rough edges And while the primary fruits still appear to lead the palate, you get a touch of all the other tertiary notes that are beginning to settle in around it. This has really great potential and might age even more beautifully than the 2011 (which we shall taste next).

Wine Review: Il Caberlot 2011, Podere Il Carnasciale

2021 vintage, 100% Caberlot, 18 months of ageing in french barrels (new around 50%), Magnum edition

 

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Dark ruby.

Nose: Opens intense and elegant, being the most perfumed of the lot. It also feels plush and velvety, and remarkably well balanced. The fruit comes through in high definition: dark red cherries, cranberry, dark cherry, a tart edge of hawthorn, and riper plums and prunes behind. Around it sits a sweet, spiced register, brown sugar, liquorice, mint and a general baking-spice warmth. The florals are generous and exotic, roses and rose petal, patchouli, agarwood, a rich wash of potpourri. There's a cooling, herbal side too, sarsaparilla, that set-jelly aiyu quality, a sweet-herbal lift and plenty of savoury herbs, with a grassy edge. Clay and slate ground it underneath.

Palate: Medium-bodied and plush, carrying a core of deep, concentrated dark fruit. Dark cherry and black cherry lead, with cranberry alongside and a lean backbone of liquorice and mint running straight through the middle, an inky note with them. It develops slowly in the glass, turning rounder and richer as it goes: vanilla and soft lactic notes, cherry skins, iris and rose petal, a touch of black sugar, a little cardamom and sarsaparilla. The acidity is gentle, the mid-palate getting denser and more herbal than the attack.

Finish: Long. Clay, slick and plush on the close, with a light, smooth vanilla and soft spice. The tannins are only faintly grainy now. Dark cherry, plums and prunes carry through with that black-sugar sweetness, an earthy, herbal sarsaparilla backbone beneath, and a last flicker of tart red fruit right at the end.

My Thoughts:

Really elegant, and really evocative. The acidity has softened right down and the tannins are fully resolved. This suggests where the 2021 is heading: the younger wine still had its fruit out front and its tannins pointing somewhere, and at a decade-plus you can see where it will land. The primary fruit has settled back and let the spice, liquorice and dried-flower notes come up in its place, which is what gives the wine its evocative, perfumed character now. It is the mature reference point the 2021 was being measured against, and on this data point the comparison really flatters the younger wine.

Wine Review: Blanc, Podere Il Carnasciale

2021 vintage, 80% Assyrtiko, 20% Trebbiano, 2 years on the lees.

 

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Deep straw.

Nose: Bright and generous, led by ripe stone fruit, plums and apricot, peach yogurt rings and vine peach, all of it fleshy rather than sharp with just a lightly tart edge. There's a creamy, almost Chardonnay-like leesy feel to it, citrus and a light doughy note and baked buns underneath, with a yogurt-lactic tang and a soft, confectionery, candied sweetness. Jasmine lifts the top. A waxy, lanolin-like, faintly resinous note runs through it, and there's real mineral depth sitting beneath the fruit. Right at the end, a chewy, almost mochi-like quality.

Palate: Medium-bodied, very fresh, plush and rich at the same time. Stone fruit leads again, vine peach and a candied sweetness through the middle, with zesty citrus and a lime-leaf lift keeping it bright. Bright Assyrtiko acidity is balanced rather than searing, and a soft, fresh minerality runs underneath, light granite tones with it. A waxy, lanolin-like texture and a resinous edge give it grip, and wild elderflower threads through the back half.

Finish: Medium length, clean. Candied, doughy and floury on the close, vine peach carrying through with a soft lactic creaminess. That waxy, lanolin note returns, the finish stays plush, and it signs off with a lightly savoury edge.

My Thoughts:

Balanced acidity, mineral and very refreshing. The acidity is gentle but it does its job, holding all that plush, ripe stone fruit in check and keeping the wine fresh and easy to drink rather than heavy. The typical Assyrtiko has a saline, high-acid cut, but here it reads much softer and creamier, the Trebbiano adding a relaxed texture while adding volume, fruit softness and a slightly nutty leesy character.

The stone fruit gives it some generosity, the leesy, creamy side adds a bit more weight while the crisp citrusy mineral backbone, makes it feel very gourmet. For a first white from an estate built on red, it is a delightfully balanced and refreshing drink.

 

@CharsiuCharlie