Innovators of Vernaccia di San Gimignano since 1989: We are guided, with great determination and without compromise, by essentially two inseparable guidelines: identity – and therefore typicality – and quality. Our Mission is creating terroir driven wines of great evolutionary skill.
More than 40 years have passed since, in 1979, Giovanni Panizzi purchased the Santa Margherita farm just outside the ancient walls of San Gimignano. There were a few hectares of vineyards in place, with which Giovanni, almost as if playing, started to make wine, with passion and his own style.
«Becoming the author of my life - Giovanni said - I emigrated to these Sienese lands with the desire, above all, to find out what my best part was that would certainly come out if I came into contact with a rural environment like this, imbued with the scent of the countryside and the smell of wine and the smell of violets born in March at the foot of cypresses, convincing me that at 50 I still had to invent a new life ».
The first Vernaccia di San Gimignano
For the first real harvest, there’s a waiting period of 10 years, until 1989: years during which, with the guidance of the oenologist Salvatore Maule, the winemaking model is honed to perfection. The first bottle of Vernaccia di San Gimignano Panizzi is introduced to the market in 1990.
White and red wines of Panizzi San Gimignano
The 90s saw the growth of the vineyard surface, with the increase od the bottles produced, and already in 1990 newlabels were born, including the Vernaccia di San Gimignano Riserva (whose 1998 vintage will be the first Vernaccia di San Gimignano to obtain 3 glasses from the Gambero Rosso Italian Wines Guide) and the Chianti Colli Senesi Vertunno, followed, at the beginning of the 2000s, by San Gimignano Rosso Folgòre and a new Vernaccia, Vigna Santa Margherita, one of the first crus of the denomination, produced entirely with grapes of the vineyard from which Panizzi was born.
These are also the years in which Giovanni Panizzi plans to project the winery into the future: in 2005, while remaining at the helm of the winery, he passes the ownership to Luano Niccolai, to whom his son Simone will succeed, with whom Giovanni collaborates closely to design the future of Panizzi. Giovanni left us in 2010, with Panizzi winery now firmly rooted in the panorama of the producers of Vernaccia di San Gimignano, and always oriented to follow, with the same "visionary" and winning spirit of its founder, the idea of quality and continuous improvement that has always distinguished it.
The leadership of Simone Niccolai, in the last 10 years, has confirmed the visionary spirit that has always been the soul of Panizzi, combined with a great foresight, which has not only led Simone Niccolai to adding to the team talented professionals in the sector, but also dictated the innovative and courageous choice to go beyond Vernaccia - a wine of indisputable character and personality - but to look to the future, exploring the panorama of red wines. The pride of Panizzi red wines is Pinot Noir, which today represents, alongside Vernaccia, the "second half" of Panizzi's sky: a sky with great horizons, projected towards the future.
