Tenuta Bellafonte Arneto Bianco 2018

Fifteen years ago Peter Heilbron was the go-to managing director of Heineken's Italian subsidiary, guiding the mass-production and distribution of the company’s products throughout the country. After a professional lifetime spent in the corporate sphere, Heilbron began to grow weary of boardroom drudgery, endless business travel, and personnel politics, finding himself yearning for a simpler life. Forgoing the corner office, Heilbron tendered his resignation and along with his wife Sabina, set out for the idyllic countryside of Umbria, purchasing a small plot of vines outside of Montefalco, in the department’s southwest corner. Though his early vintages were spent vinifying his wines in a rented cellar, 2010 saw the completion of Peter’s sleek, ‘eco-winery,’ the highly energy-efficient cantina modeled closely on that of long-time friend and Montalcino iconoclast Gianfranco Soldera. In the vineyards, Heilbron shuns chemical treatments, using seaweed and plant extracts as a kind of vine homeopathy, and in his cellar, he is equally exacting: at harvest, he leads the grape-sorting team, ferments his wines with wild yeasts and ages the wine in large, and predominantly older Slavonian oak casks, with no fining or filtration, and only a dash of sulfur at bottling.