Family history

The Bartolommei family is originally from Cinigiano; they arrived in Montalcino in the early twentieth century. Giuseppe and Elvira were sharecroppers at Santa Restituta, which also included Poderi Caprili and Capanna: Alberto, their son,was only eight months old.

In 1965 Alberto and his son Alfo purchased Podere Caprili where they already they had lived as sharecroppers since 1952 and planted the first vineyard, “Madre.” Only a year later, Alberto dies, but Alfo completes the transformation of the Podere and created the company together with his wife Anna and mother Settimia.

“Vigna Madre” is one hectare planted in 1965 by Alberto and Alfo. The first grapes are 1969. Then the new plantings in 1971. In 1972 Caprili joined the newly formed Consortium of producers. The first branded wine is from 1978, the Rosso from the vineyards Brunello and later also the Brunello di Montalcino 1978. In 1983 the first Brunello di Montalcino Riserva.

Today at Caprili there are Alfo’s children (Manuele, Paolo and Paola), Giacomo (son of Manuele) and Filippo (son of Paola). The winery has a total of 59 hectares, 24.5 of which are vineyards, mostly in Montalcino (about 20 ha) and a small part in Cinigiano (about 4.5 ha).

A total of 160,000 bottles are produced, of which: 50,000 Brunello, 40,000 of Rosso, 5,000 of Riserva, 60,000 of Sangiovese IGT (Ilex), 7,000 of Vermentino (Settimia) and 2,000 of Moscadello.
The farm is completed by 4 hectares of olive groves and about 24 families of bees from which Millefiori honey is produced within the property.

From the diary of Alfo, the farm’s founder:
“In 1915 World War I began and my grandfather Giuseppe and his brother Quirino were called up for military service: lacking valid men for work and with only women and boys left, Mr. Castelli decided topass the family to Madre, a smaller farm.
Once the men returned from the Great War and the children had grown up, my grandfather Giuseppe looked for a larger farm: it was 1928 and at that time Mr. Castelli had no estates available that would suit the Bartolommei family, then, in excellent agreement with both owners, the family moved to Argiano of Count Lovatelli, exactly to the Brizio farm, conducting it on a sharecropping basis until 1935. In that year the Capanna farm remained free to Mr. Castelli so, having remained on very good terms of mutual esteem, he came looking for us Bartolommei to propose to return under his estate, and so it was. Meanwhile, my father had married my mother Settimia in 1934, I was born on November 18, 1936, and in 1942 I began attending elementary school in Tavernelle, until I graduated from the fifth grade, obtained in 1946 with excellent report card grades, which I still retain.
After finishing school elementary school, you would work all day, doing light work, for example, the cattle grazing then at the age of 15 they would start doing all the manual labor, from hoe to spade to scythe for hay. As you got older you would move on to work with the plow pulled by oxen, to the coltrina and the voltorecchio pulled by the cows. In 1951 a split occurred between my father Alberto and his brother Arnaldo, so there were only a few of us left to work the Capanna farm, otherwise, at the Caprili, a bit smaller. On January 16, 1952, we moved to the Caprili farm, bringing all the livestock and continuing in the plowing and planting work.
Being personally very fond of vine plants-at Caprili there were#no vines left very few, about 500 stumps, because of phylloxera – and of olive trees, of which there were then about 800 plants, I began to attend training courses that were conducted by the late Dr. Bruno Ciatti of the Inspectorate of Agriculture, from whom I always got a lot of good advice that in hindsight turned out to be forward-looking and futuristic. In the mid-1950s the evolution began in the countryside of mechanical means and I immediately realized that one had to keep up with the times, so, during periods of less work on the farm, I would go and learn to drive these tractors.
In 1960 I was a tractor driver at the Argiano farm, then finally, in early 1961, I bought a tracked OM50 tractor, which allowed me both to do the work on the farm and to work as a Castelli subcontractor in Santa Restituta. On September 30, 1961, I got married to Anna Maria, in 1962 the first son Manuel was born and in 1964 the second Paolo. By 1965 the Capanna farm was empty and Cesare Castelli, Guido’s son, said to me, ‘I will sell Caprili to you, but if you can also find me a buyer who will buy Capanna.’ We knew that Giovanni Mastropaolo, an entrepreneur Italian who had made his fortune in South America, owner of the estate of Poggio alle Mura, wanted to remove all the farmers from the estates and that the Fattoi family did not want to stop, so one evening I went to see them and convinced them to come the next day to see the property: they liked it and so we bought the 2 farms-they were the first ones sold by the Castelli Martinozzi family – we through a 20-year low-interest mortgage interest of small peasant property, financial instruments created at that period to revive the agricultural sector. In fact, like just about everywhere else, the in Montalcino the countryside was being severely depopulated, everyone was leaving to seek employment in the city, and unfortunately it became the poorest municipality in the province of Siena. And those, like us, who instead decided to revive and invest in the land, we were even laughed at first. Caprili, which was paid 6 million liras (75.000 € as of today), was a property of 49 hectares in total, a large part of which was in forest – we still have 15 hectares of it today -, 10 hectares of arable land and 5 hectares of olive groves. In 1971 I planted the second vineyard and immediately started the paperwork for registration on the register of Brunello di Montalcino vineyards, and in 1972 I became member of the Consortium, which had been established in 1967. In 1974 the third daughter Paola arrived, and in those years we restored the farm and planted more Brunello vineyards, so in 1978 we had 3 hectares in production. In those years, seeing that from the markets there was a good demand for bottled wines, we removed the cattle and converted the barn into an aging cellar, buying barrels of 40-hectoliter Slavonian oak barrels. Until then we sold the wine in bulk in demijohns and some of the certified Brunello grapes to other wineries, which had already started bottling. From that point, also helped by our children, we decided to devote ourselves more and more to the cultivation of the vineyard, planting more hectares and following directly the marketing of bottled wines. In 1979 we came out with our first Rosso 1978, then called ‘from the Brunello vineyards,’ and in 1983 with the first Brunello vintage 1978, only 5,000 bottles, some of which immediately left for the United States of America, we were then only 15 wineries.“