Campo alla Sughera

Campo alla Sughera is owned by the Knauf Family, avid wine connoisseurs, who fell in love with the Bolgheri area and bought a small parcel of land to open their own boutique winery. The estate extends 22 hectares, with 16.5 currently planted to Bordeaux varieties, such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, and Petit Verdot.

POINTS OF DIFFERENTIATION

• Estate owned and estate bottled since 1997
• Strategically located in the heart of the Bolgheri growing zone, surrounded by some of the most iconic wineries in the world
• Quality driven, terroir driven, and research driven, with meticulous winery management, led by renowned enologist Stéphane Derenoncourt and skilled geology experts
• A mild seaside climate keeps vineyards cool and dry, ensuring beautiful elegance, freshness and minerality and allowing for slow and even ripening
• 20-25-year-old vines
• Long cellarability

THE HISTORY

The Knauf family, whose primary business at the time was plasterboard, began Campo alla Sughera in the late 1990s. While scouting the Tuscan coast for gypsum, they stumbled onto land more suited to grape cultivation. Having a great interest in wine and with previous experience in Mosel, it didn’t take much to convince the longtime wine lovers to start their own winery in Bolgheri. They released their first label – Arnione – in 2001 and steadily grew their range of fine wines over the next two decades, receiving excellent feedback from major reviewers along the way. Today, the winery is run by Tommaso Alessandri who has been working with the Knauf family for three years after many years working for Ruffino and earlier Birra Peroni. At the helm of the boutique winery, which makes about 110,000 bottles a year, he has focused the company’s objectives and helped develop the processes required to reach the Knauf’s uncompromising quality goals alongside the winery’s team, which includes well-known enologist Stéphane Derenoncourt, who consults with on-site enologist Francesco Gagliardi.

THE TERROIR

Campo alla Sughera is located between Castagneto Carducci and Bolgheri, only 7 km from the Tyrrhenian Sea. The weather is relatively mild, classified as Mediterranean, with coastal sunlight that reflects off the sea and moderate and well-distributed rains. The vineyards benefit from cool sea breezes, which continually aerate the vineyards, ensuring elegant, fresh wines and fending off rot and disease. The proximity to the sea and the incredible soils, which many thousands of years ago were underwater, likely contribute to the beautiful notes of minerality in the wines. Though the winery has identified 38 micro terroirs, there are two general types on the property: alluvial, with clay and gravelly, stony soils originating from the hills behind, and ancient sand and marl, with remnants of sea fossils on the side closer to the seashore.