Conti di San Bonifacio - Wine Resort

Conti di San Bonifacio - Wine Resort

The road to Conti di San Bonifacio gives up asphalt about ten minutes before it gives up the plot, narrowing from autostrada to a dirt track that climbs into the comune of Gavorrano, in the Maremma, roughly two hours from Pisa and ninety minutes from Florence, until a stone farmhouse, already a century old when Count Manfredo and Countess Sarah di San Bonifacio found it in ruins in 2002, comes into view on its hilltop above three hundred acres of vines, olive groves and woodland. The San Bonifacio name is not a marketing flourish, family parchments in Padua trace the line to a Count Milone in Verona in the tenth century, and the feuding between the San Bonifacios and the Montecchi is generally credited as the historical seed of Shakespeare's Montagues and Capulets. Manfredo and Sarah spent 2003 planting seven hectares of organic vines, took their first harvest in 2006, and opened the restored farmhouse as a seven room wine resort, three of them suites, in 2010. Day to day the place is run by Amanda, a Brooklyn born manager trained at the Culinary Institute of America, whose home cooked dinners set the tone more than any brochure could. Countess Sarah designed the interiors herself, and the results favour chestnut beams, reclaimed two hundred year old timber, terracotta floors and Egyptian cotton linen over anything that reads as decorated. The Conti di San Bonifacio Suite, at 70 square metres, keeps its four poster bed under a canopy beside an open fireplace and a Carrara marble bathroom; the Vineyard Suites run to 50 square metres with private terraces looking straight down the rows; the Olive Grove Junior Suites are smaller, at 35 to 45 square metres, and open onto the garden. The estate's oenologist, Luca D'Attoma, works with grapes grown a few hundred metres from the cellar door to produce three wines, Docet, a Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc blend, Monteregio DOC, built on Sangiovese, and Sustinet, a Syrah that has taken a Decanter gold medal and been ranked among the best Syrahs made anywhere. The Maremmana Restaurant runs on a zero kilometre principle, plates of ravioli maremmani and bucatini with pancetta and caramelised onion arriving from a kitchen that draws on the same vegetable garden guests walk past on the way to the pool, which is an outdoor infinity design cut into the hillside, with a Wine Library Bar indoors for cooler evenings and a Vineyard Bar outside for warmer ones. What it feels like, once the dirt track is behind you, is a working wine estate that has agreed to take in guests rather than a hotel that has added a vineyard for atmosphere. Sommelier Andreea runs barrel tastings that go well beyond a pour and a sales pitch, walking guests through vine to bottle with the unhurried thoroughness of someone who actually wants you to understand what you are drinking, and on summer Thursdays the chef cooks in front of the bar before everyone settles in for Italian cinema with English subtitles. There is no village to walk to, no shop to duck into, and the isolation is the entire point of the exercise rather than an inconvenience to be worked around. You should not come if you want a base for exploring hill towns, a walkable piazza, or company beyond the other six rooms, and you should check the calendar first, since the estate does a steady trade in exclusive use weddings for up to 150 guests and a booking that coincides with one will not feel like a quiet countryside retreat. You should come if what you actually want is a working Tuscan vineyard, a kitchen that cooks like someone's grandmother rather than a restaurant, and seven rooms' worth of company at most, run by people who have spent two decades building it from a ruin. The short version: A seven room working wine estate in the Maremma hills, built from a 2002 ruin by Count Manfredo and Countess Sarah di San Bonifacio, with award winning Syrah, an infinity pool, and total isolation from the nearest village.