The Fruit of Innovation: a Frescobaldi Dynasty
There aren’t many businesses in the Mediterranean that can claim Henry VIII or Michaelangelo as faithful customers. In fact, there is only one: The Frescobaldi family. The Frescobaldi’s trace their lineage back over 700 years before their legacy of vintage Italian wine.
Winemaking was not the family’s first love. The oldest records trace their roots back to Bruges, where they worked as cloth merchants. When they took up residence in Florence, they became part of that city’s power base as members of a small network that controlled cloth-working in the city as well as expanding their interests into the banking sector.
Today’s Vintage Italian Wine
As bankers in London, the Frescobaldi’s became financiers to many members of European royal families, which helped them control the pursestrings of the kings of England and the sales of English wool to the Arte Della Lana wool guild in Florence.
While the family found much success for hundreds of years, working as head of England’s customs and papal tax-gatherers, they also had their share of hard times. Wars, trends in the Catholic Church, and dynastic changes led the family into bankruptcy more than once, which inspired a few family members to begin producing Tuscan wine in around 1308.
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While other financial pursuits eventually became less fruitful, the Frescobaldi love affair with the art of winemaking began to produce consistently good harvests. They developed a notable client base with the aforementioned King Henry VIII and Michaelangelo. Receipts for these transactions exist today in the national archives.
But the real change in family fortunes arrived with the marriage of Leonia Albizi to Angiolo Frescobaldi in 1855. The Albizi Family was a winemaking powerhouse from France. They brought two things the Frescobaldi family needed to scale: Leonia’s sharp mind and ideas for modern wine production techniques and three types of vines to the region: Chardonnay, Cabernet, and Merlot.
Leonia was a strong woman and brought her considerable knowledge of winemaking to modernize existing and future facilities. Her designs for gravity-fed cellars earned her the gold medal at the Paris Expo in 1878. Indeed, the Pomino Winery still uses the same building and technology she designed almost 150 years ago.
If you fall in love with the past, you are going to be stuck in the past and someone is going to go faster then you
Today’s Vintage Italian Wine
Today, the Frescobaldi name is widely associated with some of the most exclusive vintages worldwide, and their vineyards are throughout Italy. The family operations are run by Marchese Lamberto Frescobaldi, son of Vittorio Frescobaldi.
In a nod to Grandmother Leonia, Lamberto directed the Pomino winery to develop a sparkling Rose in 2014. He named the vintage Leonia Pomino Rose.
“A courageous and determined wine that calls us to embark on new paths,” Lamberto Frescobaldi explains, “It has an expressive and elegant character just like my great-great-grandmother who inspires my innovative choices.”
