Tenuta Veloria
The land the wine comes from.
42 hectares on the southern hills of Siena, at 340 metres above sea level. It began as 7 of them, and the way it is worked has not changed since.
A hill in the province of Siena, drawn from above.
The estate was never laid out to a plan. The parcels are where the family could reach them, in the order they could be paid for, and the map still shows it, the rows run whichever way the slope allows, and the roads between them were paths first.
1978 to today
It started as 7 hectares.
Matteo Bellandi, the son of a local farmer, bought a slope with an old stone cellar standing on it. There was no money for modern production, so the first vintages were made in barrels under the family house, and the first bottle sold under the Veloria name went out in 1986.
Everything after that was added a parcel at a time, slowly enough that nobody had to change how the wine was made.
One mark, one hectare. The 7 dark ones are the plot bought in 1978; the other marks are the rest of the 42 the estate works now.
Picked by hand, fermented in small batches.
The fruit comes off the vine into shallow baskets. The oldest parcels and the newest are worked the same way, because nothing about the work has been changed to make it quicker. Each parcel ferments on its own, in small batches, and what happens next is decided afterwards rather than before.
Some of it then goes into French oak and stays there for years. Time is the part of this that cannot be hurried, and it is the part the estate is built around.
What stands on it.
- The family house1892
- The cellar1978
- The vineyards42 hectares
- The tasting room
- The restaurant
- A small guest hotel
- The olive garden
- A cellar of collector wines
The house was here a long time before the wine was. The cellar came with the land in 1978, and everything else grew up around the two of them.
Looking across the valley from the high corner of the property, where the ground stays coolest and the white is planted.