Rocca di Frassinello: a wine cellar of art and wine

Architecture and art of wine meet in Gavorrano in the Tuscan Maremma. Here, among green hills and hectares of precious vineyards, stands the Rocca di Frassinello, an estate acquired at the end of the 90s by Paolo Panerai, publisher and CEO of Class Editori, with a joint venture between Castellare di Castellina, a Chiantigiana company property of Panerai, and Domaines Barons de Rothschild-Château Lafite. His particularity? It is the only winery designed by Renzo Piano throughout his career.

Here, an area of about 8,000 square meters surrounded by another 500 hectares of which 125 occupied by the vineyard, the archistar has developed the entire complex around an orange colored building with essential but suggestive forms: the barriccaia. It is a square hall (40 meters by 40), basement, without supporting columns and with exposed concrete finishes, a "wine church", as Piano calls it, with 2,500 barrels arranged in concentric steps. This place is also the heart of the project because around it the typical processing of the fall grapes takes place: «the grapes are harvested in an iperselective way and then placed in boxes, arrives on the large courtyard of the cellar where it is subjected to further selection on the table of work. So by fall, through various manhole covers, go into the steel vat below ». On the sides of the barrel room are distributed all the other functions of the production cycle: with a glass pavilion houses the administrative and commercial spaces; while the tasting room, offices and residences are on the north side. Impossible not to notice the terrace of the "churchyard of Rocca di Frassinello", an open-air square of over 5,000 square meters, where, in the center, stands a tower that has the purpose of controlling temperature, humidity and other meteorological intemperance. To complete Piano's work there is nature, with the vines from which wines like Vermentino, Sangioveto, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah and Merlot will be born.

A couple of fun facts: the famous artist David LaChapelle has fallen in love with the artist of this special place in the Maremma, so much so that he has dedicated a work called Rapture of the Grape, from which a limited edition of wine bottles has been dealt . The second fact is of an archaeological nature. On the property was found a necropolis with 8 tombs inside which were found objects related to the culture of wine, among which a wine amphora of Greek origin with the reproduction of a ballet with Dionysus dating back to 480 BC.