It is rare, even for someone with the good fortune to taste many of the world’s leading wines, to discover a new wine that is so breathtakingly distinctive and exceptional as Ipsus. Its existence owes much to the creation of the Gran Selezione classification at the summit of the three-tied Chianti Classico pyramid in February 2014. But it owes at least as much to the talent and foresight of Giovanni Mazzei’s whose personal project it is. That project draws on the 600 years of accumulated experience of the Mazzei family in the vineyards of Chianti (with Giovanni the 25th generation at its helm) and the profound knowledge of terroir that this has imparted. For it is that which led to the identification of the potential of the cooler plots of the Il Caggio estate in the heart of Chianti, with six parcels from within its ‘Clos’ being selected to be planted with the most appropriate clones of Sangiovese. And that selection in turn is itself the product of a half-century of meticulous research, with four of the eight clones coming from Mazzei’s own massal selection programme and three of the others from Chianti Classico clones). The 6 parcels together form a vineyard-within-a-vineyard, the ‘Clos’ (a self-contained and walled enclave) of just 6.5 hectares of the 150 hectares of the Il Caggio estate that was acquired by the Mazzei family in 2006. I was fortunate enough to be invited to the property in mid-June to taste through a mini-vertical and to
This Article was originally published on The Drink Business - Fine Wine
