Some years ago Kate Singleton wrote about Italian organic wines on her New York Times' column, giving great prominence to our estate and wines. Here what she said about Cupano:
Lionel Cousin, a Frenchman who makes organic wines of great elegance and depth near Montalcino in Tuscany, goes against the stream. At his Cupano winery (www.cupano.it), fermentation is entrusted to the natural ambient yeasts, which behave admirably.
Cousin, who came to winemaking after a successful career in film photography, has an extraordinary aptitude for listening to the environment. "Either you cling on to what your oenologist tells you, which is based on chemistry, or you observe nature and try to interpret what it's telling you," he says.
Surrounded by several hundred hectares of organic arable farming and woodland, the 35-hectare Cupano estate has three and a half hectares of vineyards densely planted on slopes that embrace both sandy clay soils and stony terrains. New planting is underway, but the estate will remain small.
"I believe that as a society we've become too interventionist," Cousin says. "Constantly having your nascent wines analyzed in laboratories is rather like obsessively measuring blood pressure. The pharmaceutical and chemical industries have vested interests in promoting both. But without all this you can still tell when your vines are suffering, just as you know when you are not feeling well. I don't believe in preemptively taking medicines in either case."
