By Eimear Corcoran
Sustainability has become one of those words that is basically everywhere. It’s on food packaging, fashion websites, skincare bottles and, obviously, wine labels. We’re constantly being told that the products we buy are becoming greener, cleaner and more environmentally friendly.
But as a Gen Z consumer, it’s hard not to be slightly sceptical. What does “sustainable” actually mean? Is it recyclable packaging? Organic farming? Solar panels? Using less water? Protecting biodiversity? Or is it all of those things at once?
For ColleMassari, a family run winery in Montecucco, Tuscany, the answer seems to be less about one big sustainability project and more about an entire way of managing the land. And perhaps the most interesting part is that this isn’t something the estate suddenly started doing because sustainability became trendy. It has been part of the plan for decades.
In episode 2789 of the Italian Wine Podcast, Stevie Kim visited ColleMassari and spoke with Giuliano Guerrini, the estate’s agronomist, who has spent 27 years working in the Montecucco DOC and knows this territory inside out.
Sustainability Before It Was a Buzzword
ColleMassari was established in 1998 by siblings Claudio Tipa and Maria Iris Bertarelli, who bought the estate with the intention of developing the property while respecting its natural environment.
The estate covers around 1,200 hectares, but only a relatively small proportion is dedicated to vineyards. The rest includes woodland, olive groves and other agricultural land. In fact, as Giuliano Guerrini, the leading agronomist at ColleMassari explains, there are 627 hectares of woodland, which produce oxygen and help keep the air clean. Such diversity might seem strange for a winery. If you have all that land, why not plant more grapes?
Because, in this case, the forest is an integral part of the plan. Keeping large areas of natural vegetation means the estate isn’t treating every piece of land as something that needs to become an area of production. Instead, the vineyards exist as part of a much larger ecosystem. The estate isn’t just somewhere you grow grapes, it’s an entire landscape that happens to produce wine.
The Vineyard Is Only One Part of the Picture
ColleMassari’s vineyards have been organically certified since 2003, but the estate’s approach goes beyond simply avoiding synthetic chemicals. There are olive trees, woodland and other crops that sit alongside the vineyards. The estate has around 16,000 olive trees, some of which are centuries old, as well as hundreds of hectares of woodland.
From a Gen Z perspective, this is probably one of the most interesting parts of the story.
We hear a lot about biodiversity, but it can feel quite abstract. A winery gives you a very physical example of what that can actually look like. Instead of having one enormous landscape dedicated entirely to one crop (“a monoculture”), different plants and habitats exist alongside one another.
And Then They Built a Winery Into a Hill
The sustainability conversation gets even more interesting when you look at the actual winery. Rather than building a conventional cellar and then figuring out how to make it more efficient, ColleMassari’s winery was designed around the landscape. Architect Edoardo Milesi designed the building into the hillside, with three levels that allow gravity to move the grapes through different stages of the winemaking process.
The ageing cellar is also built into the rock, helping maintain naturally stable temperatures and humidity. Instead of constantly using energy to fight the environment, the building uses the environment to its advantage.
The Sun Is Doing Some of the Work Too
The estate has also invested in renewable energy. Solar panels provide a significant proportion of the winery’s energy needs, while rainwater is collected and treated through a natural phytoremediation system before being returned to the agricultural cycle.
Furthermore, with the onset of climate change, the relationship between the vine, the soil and the water changes from one day to the next, which is why Giuliano Guerrini explains, he has to closely monitor the natural cycle of the vines according to the principles of organic viticulture.
What About the Grapes Themselves?
There’s another side to ColleMassari’s approach that is easy to overlook. Sustainability isn’t only about energy and emissions, it is also about genetics. The estate has invested in preserving old Sangiovese vines from the local area, including material from its Poggio Lombrone vineyard, where some vines are more than 70 years old. ColleMassari has identified different genetic families within these old vines and propagated selected material to create new vineyards. Why bother? Because a vineyard isn’t just a collection of plants producing grapes, it is also a record of the region’s agricultural history. By keeping old genetic material alive, the estate is preserving something that could otherwise disappear, and that feels particularly relevant when we talk about biodiversity.
Innovation Doesn’t Have to Mean New
There’s a common misconception in modern business that innovation always means creating something completely new – new technology, new products or new systems – but wine works on a different timeline. A 70-year-old vine can be more valuable than a brand-new planting. An ancient olive tree can still contribute to an estate. A forest that was never converted into vineyards can be just as important to the land as the grapes growing beside it.
ColleMassari’s approach is interesting because it combines old and new rather than treating them as opposites. They use solar energy and modern winery design, but they also preserve old vines and centuries-old olive trees. They use modern research to understand traditional Sangiovese genetics. As Giuliano Guerrini says, “given the technological solutions and possibilities we have today, it’s a challenge that looks into the future.”
Why Should Wine Drinkers Care about sustainability?
You could argue that none of this matters once the bottle is on the table. At the end of the day, people buy wine because they like how it tastes.
But younger consumers are increasingly interested in what happens before a product reaches them. Who made it? Where did it come from? How was it produced? What happened to the land? What was the environmental?
For Gen Z in particular, sustainability has become part of the conversation around almost everything we consume. Wine has a pretty big story to tell here. It comes from the land, it depends on weather, water and biodiversity, and increasingly it has to deal with a changing climate. So asking whether a wine is sustainable isn’t a side question anymore, it’s becoming mainstream.
The Bigger Problem for Wine
Climate change creates an uncomfortable situation for traditional wine regions. The identity of places like Tuscany is deeply connected to their landscapes and grape varieties. But the climate those traditions developed in isn’t necessarily going to stay the same. Warmer temperatures can change when grapes ripen, extreme weather can damage crops, water availability can become more difficult. That’s why wineries have to think beyond the next vintage. They have to think about whether the land will still work in 20, 30 or 50 years. That is where ColleMassari’s approach becomes particularly relevant. Its long-term vision isn’t about abandoning tradition because the climate is changing.
Maybe the Future Is Less About “Green” Wine
There’s a temptation to think of sustainable wine as a category. But sustainability shouldn’t just describe a particular type of wine. Ideally, it should describe how wine is made. ColleMassari offers one example of what that could look like, keeping forests rather than clearing them, protecting biodiversity, preserving old vines, using renewable energy, designing buildings around the landscape and thinking about the estate as something that needs to survive long after the current generation is gone.
For a generation constantly being told that we have to think about the future, there is something powerful about a winery making decisions for people who won’t be there to see the results. After all, sustainable wine isn’t about making wine that is simply “green”, it’s about making sure there is still a landscape capable of producing wine in the first place.
Listen to the full conversation between Stevie Kim and Giuliano Guerrini from ColleMassari:
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