Ronchi di Castelluccio is reborn between zoning, old vineyards and biodiversity

Born in New Orleans, raised between the United States and Switzerland, with a long experience as entrepreneurs in the renewable energy and high finance sectors, in 2020 the two brothers purchased and expanded the property founded in 1974 by the film director and producer Gian Vittorio Baldi on the wooded and cool slopes of Modigliana. They thus reconnect with the family's land of origin and create the second piece of a shared and passionate agricultural project already started with the acquisition in 2017 of Poggio della Dogana , a farm in the Terra del Sole area (Forlì-Cesena).
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The agronomic and oenological management is entrusted to Francesco Bordini , son of Remigio Bordini who together with Vittorio Fiore interpreted Baldi's visionary idea to create a precision and highly qualitative winemaking reality in Romagna, gained upon returning from the honeymoon in Bordeaux. After a discussion with his friend Luigi Veronelli, Baldi entrusted himself to the two young technicians who carried out a massive selection of valuable clones with limited yields, rejected precisely because they were not in line with the quantitative production of the time. Bordini and Fiore gave life to the first zoning experiment in the Region, among the first in Italy. They selected the Bordeaux vines and Sangiovese, which in Romagna would find one of the most suitable territorial expressions, bred in the so-called Ronchi, crus torn from the woods, vinified strictly as single vineyards .
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Starting from 2020, therefore, the Ramettas begin a process aimed at bringing the company back into vogue by starting from the original cornerstones. They restore the historic vineyards without cutting down any plants and restore the old training methods, such as the very low sapling to ripen the grapes even at colder temperatures, exploiting the heat emitted by the soil. The defects were replaced using old ecotypes found in Remigio Bordini's notes and passed on to his son Francesco. Each Ronco is vinified individually as originally and transformed with meticulous respect for the identity of the vineyard of origin, experiencing a process of rebirth that has already expressed excellent qualitative results, thanks also to the work relating to integrated biodiversity . In November 2023, in fact, the Rametta brothers purchased the farm of the historic Fontana agricultural company, 390 hectares that embrace the Ronchi di Castelluccio company, with livestock breeding at its core. To date, the estate includes over 100 heads of Limousine cows, a very renowned French breed with a mostly docile character, and bulls. The breeding is of a reproductive type, aimed at the sale of calves. In the winter months the livestock winters in the stables but from April to October they are left free within the company's meadow pasture lands, where there are six lakes that allow watering, one hundred hectares of woodland and around a thousand olive trees. The breeding is certified organic and can boast the Suolo e Salute leaf, a standard that allows you to work even more rigorously in the vineyard by being able to use zero-mile fertilizer from the stable.

Integrated biodiversity is a common thread that links Ronchi di Castelluccio to Poggio della Dogana , whose organically managed vineyards extend for 20 hectares on the hills between Castrocaro Terme and Brisighella. The vineyards, in particular planted with Sangiovese and Albana, host a small production of Linden and Wildflower honey managed by a local beekeeper. Far from pesticides and inorganic fertilisers, the hosts take care of the pollination of the vine, promoting the production of grapes and maintaining the quality of the harvest. Biodiversity is also guaranteed by the dozens of olive trees which, in addition to enriching the landscape, perform fundamental environmental functions, mitigating the climate and hosting the microfauna functional to organic cultivation.