About Azienda Agricola Oasi degli Angeli
Marco Casolanetti is the fifth generation of his family to work the land at Sant'Egidio, a few kilometres inland from the Adriatic at Cupra Marittima. He took over the property with Eleonora Rossi in the mid-1990s. They replanted plots that had once fed a local orzo pasta tradition. The pair rebuilt the estate around the two grapes the family had always kept in its corners: Montepulciano, and the local Grenache strain known as Bordo.
The first Kurni was bottled in 1997. It comes from a single block of century-old Montepulciano, planted at up to 50,000 vines per hectare: five in every square metre. Pruning is severe and the crop is thinned hard. The fruit ferments on its own in large Grenier oak casks of 2,500 and 3,000 litres. The wine then spends two spells in brand-new French oak barrels, around 22 to 24 months in all, and is bottled unfined and unfiltered. Critics such as Eric Guido at Vinous group it with Italy's most concentrated reds, and recent vintages have scored 100 points at Falstaff.
Kupra is the second wine. It comes from a vineyard of just under four acres at Ripatransone, planted with 100-year-old Bordo vines on south-facing rocky soil at around 350 metres. The fruit ferments in cement egg tanks with no temperature control, then ages for 32 months in barrel. Production hovers near 500 bottles a year. That is why Kupra counts among Italy's rarest single-grape Grenaches, and why release prices climb well above 200 euros a bottle.
Casolanetti runs the cellar with an engineer's discipline and a hands-off approach. Nothing is added during fermentation, and sulphur goes in only just before bottling. The young wines lie for a long time on their spent yeasts in new oak before the first move into clean barrels. The estate holds no organic or biodynamic certificate, but Vinous and the importer Field Blend Selections both describe the farming as natural in practice. Output stays small by design, and both reds carry the regional Marche IGT rather than Rosso Piceno DOC or Offida DOCG.
There is no public tasting room and no online booking. The two reds reach the UK through specialist merchants who sell by allocation. Each new release of Kurni is one of the most fought-over Italian wines of the year.
Editorial · ItalianWines.co.uk
Marche
2 wines 
Walk-ins welcome 
Alicante
