To us family has always been the foundation for every project.
That’s what Marco has always taught us. A family brought together not just by a name, but one that shares values and perspectives. We were born and grew up here, in Montalcino, not just a land, but the land we consider home. That’s why everything that we do and we will do, is and will always be based on respect for our surroundings. A willingness to improve things and improve ourselves that doesn’t just seek to merely overcome old, antiquated ideas, but that belongs to the broadest meaning of technical and cultural evolution, which allowed us and the whole territory of Montalcino to broaden our horizons, learning everything that there was to learn, so as to become a reference point in the global oenological sector. We were blessed by these improvements and we want to continue on this path, in order to become witnesses but also active participants to that very innovation we’d been looking for so strongly, always making everyone’s best interest and the community’s well-being our starting point.
The Cortonesi family was already living in these lands before the end of the Second World War. This was a difficult time for the history of Italy as a whole, and Montalcino’s in particular. But it was the will to invest in the territory, to believe in an evolution that appeared impossible at the time, which has brought Marco to where he is now, and that will guide his children in the future.
Because we never gave up, because we have always believed in upholding the ideals of honesty and hard work which, without a doubt, have repaid us. This was made possible by the constant attention that the whole family has always poured into studying vine cultivation and winemaking techniques, always keeping an eye on the past to remember our origins, considering respect for traditions and the purity of Sangiovese as our “commandments”, while being able to leave behind those ideologies that we considered outdated, dashing towards an unknown world that we would face sooner or later: the future.
We have therefore decided that family should be the starting point for our wines. Hence the idea of enhancing our name, by renaming our company “Cortonesi” in order to stress even more, if possible, our connection to Montalcino’s name. A change we’ve strongly wanted, among other things, to differentiate our products, our Brunello wines, born in extremely different terroirs, that otherwise risked stagnating with a name that did not represent the territory’s reality. La Mannella will always remain the main and most essential part of our wines, no longer then a company “brand”, but synonymous with territory, with a delimited patch of land on the slopes of Montalcino hill, near Montosoli, that made us grow into who we are today.