Fattoria Uccelliera di Ezio Bulleri Uccelliera

«Uccelliera» is a medieval place name. It referred to the hill on which an ancient uccellanda stood: a device for catching the birds that passed through here on their migrations. The place was called that because that was where the birds were taken.

Today that same piece of hillside does the opposite. The arable land is farmed extensively, and the company states that the first thought, in managing it that way, is to offer the wildlife an environment to live in. It is the reversal of a name, and it happened without changing it.

The company's logo was not born in a graphic design studio. It was born from a find: on the estate, fragments emerged of an ancient stone carved with a coat of arms bearing three balls and three birds. That drawing became the trademark.

It is the first in a series of signs that here are not invented: they are found. The name comes from the Middle Ages, the logo comes from a broken stone, and the subsoil — as we shall see — comes from much further away.

In the estate's fields a fossil coral reef was found dating back more than a million years. It is the geological explanation of what you drink. The soils here are mainly tufaceous and siliceous, with some clay areas, between eighty and two hundred metres above sea level.

When the company speaks of the memory of the sea, it is speaking of soil. On these hills, the difference between two rows two hundred metres apart is made by what was there before there was a Tuscany.

The farm was born out of Antonio Bulleri and Maria Elena Poggianti's passion for the countryside and for nature. From then on it has been a family matter that has never been interrupted: what was a life choice for two people became the craft of those who came after.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Consorzio Vini Terre di Pisa recalls, at least ten families lived on this land in sharecropping smallholdings. Some of those farmhouses have been restored with old materials, so as not to lose their Tuscan historical and architectural character. The houses stayed where they were; what changed is who sleeps in them.

Today the company is led by the second generation, with the third already inside it, and the roles are stated one by one. Ezio looks after the agronomic side: vineyards, olive groves and forestry. Tiziana looks after sales. Matilde takes care of hospitality. Benedetta contributes to communications while studying at university.

Four people sharing an entire business between them, from the pruning to the invoice: there is no office, there is a table where people talk to one another.

Each year the labels carry a figure with different animals. It is not decoration: it serves to tell the story of the local wildlife and, at the same time, to mark the vintage. Anyone with a small vertical in the cellar does not have to read the year — they recognise the animal.

It is the most coherent gesture in the whole business. The wildlife is in the fields, it is in the name of the place, it is in the coat of arms that was found, and it ends up on the bottle. There is no passage in this story in which the animals are absent.

The stated method is made mostly of subtractions. Manual harvest. Careful selection of the grapes. Interventions in the cellar reduced to a minimum. The two levers held in hand are the fermentation temperature and the time of contact with the skins: the rest is allowed to happen.

The same grammar holds for the oil. The olives are brucate, that is, stripped from the tree by hand between November and December, and go straight to the olive mill for cold pressing. Six hectares of olive grove, some with hundred-year-old trees.

Among the labels there are two that say better than the others how this cellar thinks. Nero in Bianco is Sangiovese vinified as a white: the most Tuscan red grape there is, taken to the other side. And Ginepraia Botte n.7 comes from a separate selection of the best Sangiovese grapes, kept apart in a limited mass of fifteen hectolitres.

Fifteen hectolitres is barely two thousand bottles. It is the gesture of someone who, having reached the end of the selection, decides that this small amount is not to be mixed with the rest.

In April 2024 Gambero Rosso published its list of the ten best Italian Viogniers under twenty euros. L'Isola 2022 from the Fattoria Uccelliera is on it.

Viognier is a variety from the northern Rhône, not a grape from around here. That a family farm in the Pisan hills should end up in a national list with that variety says two things: that they experiment here, and that the result stands up to comparison beyond the province.

The sentence the company puts at the top of its own website does not talk about wine. It talks about how you stand in the world while making it.

And home they state with equal simplicity: «The Pisan hills, between the municipalities of Crespina Lorenzana and Fauglia, are our home.» The motto the company has chosen for itself, on the other hand, is in Latin and has been going round the countryside for centuries: Vinum bonum laetificat cor hominum, good wine gladdens the heart of man.