Casanova di Neri Visit
I first met Marianna Neri at the Coldiretti tasting in Rome, early in the week. She was pouring at her family’s table, looking like she’d walked straight off a Milan editorial shoot. The wine in her glass was every bit as polished as she was.
Faster forward 48 hours and I would see Marianna again, this time at her family’s winery with journalists and other folks in the wine trade.
Giovanni Neri founded Casanova di Neri estate in 1971. Today his son Giuseppe runs it alongside his wife Simona, daughter Marianna, and winemaker son GianLorenzo. Four family members, one estate, fifty-plus years of momentum.
You feel that momentum the moment you arrive.
While we walked together toward the cellar, Marianna and I talked about daily life growing up in this remote region. This is not a village with a school around the corner. She told me that children attend elementary school locally, but for high school they travel all the way to Siena.
That’s roughly an hour by car. It means a daily bus and a parent driving you to the pickup point. For me, that one detail reframed everything.
This is not just a wine zone on a map. It’s a place where raising a family requires the same tenacity it takes to farm Sangiovese on these hills.
And what hills. Our first stop was a vantage point with a full 360-degree view over the estate’s vineyards. It was March, so the landscape had that particular Tuscan softness to it, all rolling green under a cool sky.
Simona and Giuseppe walked us through what we were seeing, how much the estate had grown since Giovanni planted his first vines. I stood there thinking how lucky this family is to wake up to this every morning. Then I remembered the hour-long school bus and revised that thought slightly.
From the view, we went underground into the winery.
The first room was all gleaming stainless steel, modern and serious. No rustic charm here. This is a cellar built to make precise wine at scale. But then we turned a corner into the barrel room and everything shifted.
The sheer density of wood in that space was something else. Barrels of every format filled every available inch, stacked and squeezed together so tightly that walking through felt like navigating some magnificent underground labyrinth. The air was damp and heavy with that unmistakable perfume of wine aging in oak, the kind of smell that makes you want to inhale with your whole chest.
Simona explained that this beautiful congestion is the direct result of decades of growth. You can’t just add barrel space overnight. It takes planning, construction, time. In the meantime, you make it work.
Then came the tasting, and this is where the visit earned its place in my notebook. We sat at round tables in a dedicated tasting room that felt more like a living room than a bar. Simona and Marianna led us through several wines across different vintages, each one clean, structured, and built with obvious intention.
The house style is polished but not flashy. These are wines that want you to wait for them.
But the wine that stopped me was the Rosso di Montalcino. In most producers’ lineups, Rosso plays the approachable younger sibling. Pleasant, easy, forgettable. Not here. Simona was emphatic on this point.
They do not treat their Rosso as a second wine. To them, it is an equal. And in the glass, she was right. The complexity caught me off guard. This was not a simple early-drinking red filling a price point. It had the depth and balance I associate with a good Brunello, just at a fraction of the cost.
When some of us wandered into the shop afterward, I knew exactly what I was buying. My budget allowed for one bottle and I chose the Rosso without hesitation. For anyone scanning a wine list and looking for the smartest spend in Montalcino, remember that decision.
Sometimes the second wine isn’t second at all. You just have to find the producers who refuse to let it be.
