PART I
DIRADAMENTO
“Green harvest is an act of faith. You cut what is promising, so what remains might survive.”
—From the notes of Alessia Alighieri
1
ALESSIA
I know my vines better than I know myself—certainly better than I know my husband of ninety days.
My world is Tenuta Pietra Alta, the Alighieri estate in Bolgheri, where I make wine. Vines run like green seams across the hills, stitched into soil the color of rusted pennies and old blood.
Pietra Alta means high stone, and the vine growing in thisterroirabsorbs all of the goodness the earth offers to produce the wine that I make.
Stone is everywhere here—stone walls, stone terraces, stone outcroppings that break through the earth like knuckles. Even the air feels mineral at dawn, salted faintly by the Tyrrhenian Sea in the distance.
The estate has its own rhythm, indifferent to weddings and mergers and the politics of Florence. The vines don’t care that my last name is Alighieri. They don’t care that my father has decided that, as a woman, I cannot be the head winemaker, and as a woman, my purpose is to bring a man into the family to run the House of Alighieri.
The vines care about sun and wind and water and the relentless arithmetic of time.
They don’t care that my sister is furious on my behalf.
Alba is the fiery one. She says what everyone else swallows. At twenty-seven, she's the successful Alighieri daughter.
She runs the hospitality arm of the House of Alighieri—three Michelin-starred restaurants in Italy, three more spread across the globe, and every tasting room across our estates in Europe and Napa. The places where critics, investors, and royalty drink our wine and decide what it’s worth.
My father knows very little about hospitality and values it even less, even though it accounts for nearly 18% of the company’s annual revenue. He calls it image. Necessary, but ornamental.
The estate I manage brings in far less—at least on paper. Once again, he has given to his daughter what he deems less important.
Our flagship wines come from Chianti and Brunello di Montalcino—historic, recognizable names that anchor the brand. Those are the bottles he sends to auction houses and heads of state.
Beyond them, the family portfolio stretches wide: Barolo in the north, a smaller but fiercely protected holding on Mount Etna, legacy vineyards in Montepulciano, and newer experimental parcels in Umbria and the Maremma. Some are profitable. Some are prestigious. All of them are watched carefully.
Bolgheri, and Tenuta Pietra Alta in particular, does not shout for attention. It makes money quietly. Reliably. It holds when others don’t. As my father, the great Duca Cesare Alighieri, says, “There isn’t much she can harm there.”
But what he doesn’t know is that I intend to build. I hadto sell my soul, marry Niccolò Alarico, to become the official winemaker at Tenuta Pietra Alta—and now that I’m here, I’m going to make it the biggest, the best, the most prestigious estate in the House of Alighieri.
And this is why I don’t have time to worry about the state of my marriage. We’re knee-deep indiradamentoright now, the green harvest that decides whether a vintage will be merely good or exceptional. As we prepare forvendemmia, harvest, in the fall, every choice matters.
Diradamento, green harvest, means walking every single row and judging every single vine. It means deciding which clusters live and which are sacrificed so the remaining grapes can ripen with concentration and balance.
It’s ruthless work.
Emotional, too, if you let yourself feel it.
The process is done entirely by hand, by a small, trusted crew. There are no machines for this. No shortcuts. When you have over a hundred acres of vines as we do in Tenuta Pietra Alta, it means weeks of long days under a merciless August sun, shoulders burning, fingers sticky with juice and dust, backs aching as the hours stretch on.
We start at dawn to steal what cool we can, moving slowly and deliberately.
Too aggressive, you weaken the vine. Too cautious, you dilute the wine.
Every cut is a judgment call, informed by soil, slope, canopy growth, rainfall patterns—terroir—and instinct earned the hard way.
This is the kind of work that doesn’t tolerate distraction.
