Tenuta San Leonardo

Tenuta San Leonardo sits at Avio, at the southern end of Trentino, on the left bank of the Adige between the slopes of Monte Baldo and the Lessini mountains. It is a walled village rather than a winery: a church, a monastery, a villa, cellars and 300 hectares of land whose boundary still follows the old feudal estate. The Frati Crociferi built the church and monastery here around 1215, and the place was known for vines well before that. The de Gresti family are documented on the estate from 1646 and eventually bought it outright from the Church, building Villa Gresti around 1874. In 1892 Gemma de Gresti married Marchese Tullo Guerrieri Gonzaga, and that family have been here ever since.

Thirty of the 300 hectares are vineyard, all red grapes, starting at 150 metres. Merlot goes on the pebbly bed of an old tributary of the Adige; Cabernet Sauvignon and the old Carmenere on lighter sandy ground. The Ora del Garda, the wind off the lake, blows through the vineyards all summer and dries the leaves, which is one of the reasons the estate was able to begin converting to organic farming in 2015 and hold full certification from late 2018. It also carries Biodiversity Friend certification and, since 2024, Equalitas.

Carlo Guerrieri Gonzaga made the reputation. He studied oenology in Lausanne and then worked with Mario Incisa della Rocchetta at San Guido, the Sassicaia estate, who taught him the Bordeaux blend and whom Carlo calls his oenological godfather. San Leonardo, the wine, was first made in 1965. Carlo planted Cabernet Sauvignon in 1978. Giacomo Tachis became the estate's oenologist in 1982, the 1988 took the estate's first Tre Bicchieri, and in 1997 Wine Spectator named San Leonardo the best red in Italy and the twelfth best wine in the world. Carlo Ferrini makes the wine now and Carlo's son Anselmo runs the estate. Gambero Rosso named it Italian winery of the year for 2025.

The winemaking is deliberately old-fashioned. The fermentation cellar holds nothing but concrete vats, and the reds start fermenting on their own, without cultured yeast, for a fortnight or so with pump-overs and delestage. The underground barrel cellar, built in 2001, holds the wines for at least two years.

San Leonardo itself is the flagship, a Cabernet Sauvignon, Carmenere and Merlot blend that plenty of people would name as the best Bordeaux-style red in Italy. Alongside it sit Villa Gresti, a Riesling, the Gemma and two Trento DOC sparkling wines.

Three others are worth having in their own right. The Carmenere is the estate's most unusual bottle and carries its best story. Terre di San Leonardo is the second wine of the flagship and, for what it is, very fairly priced indeed. Vette is the Sauvignon Blanc, and it is worth knowing that its fruit comes from Valle di Cembra and the hills around Pressano, Sorni and Trento rather than from the estate at Avio.