Andrea Franchetti was an exceptional talent, a visionary, a rebel – and ultimately an icon of Italian viticulture, which was not short of great personalities. The dismay was correspondingly great when the son of an American mother and an Italian father died in December 2021 at the age of 72. Of his two companies, Passopisciaro in Sicily and Tenuta di Trinoro in Tuscany, the latter in particular is one of the legendary wineries in Italy, whose top wines cost several hundred euros a bottle.
Even after his death, the wines that are now pressed by his chief oenologist and his sons convey an impression of what made Franchetti and his unconventional winemaker art so special. The most affordable, but certainly not the least interesting, is Le Cupole, which, as the so-called second wine of the Tenuta di Trinoro, has a lot of the enormous opulence, power and structure of the really great wines, but is not nearly as expensive.