SIGNORA GINNI

Altitude | 300 metres

Soil | Clay, sand and silt

Approach | Natural, unfiltered, wild yeast, no added sulphites

As you may be able to guess from Giorgia Salierno’s distinctive wine labels, this young winemaker once worked in fashion. Born in Tuscany and raised in Umbria, Giorgia initially moved to Milan to study fashion, working across a multi-brand showroom and also backstage at runway fashion shows for several years. In 2015, however, she returned to her hometown of Perugia. There, she met the now legendary natural winemaker Danilo Marcucci, who was in the early stages of releasing his first vintages at Conestabile della Staffa - a winery that had been in his wife’s family for generations but had been neglected since the Second World War. Danilo took Giorgia under his wing, introducing her to the philosophy and labour and love of natural winemaking, and soon enough Giorgia turned her back on the fashion world in favour of a life in nature, among the vines.

”We began working together and I cut my teeth in all things wine with Danilo, from the vineyard to the cellar,” says Giorgia of her start. “I am very passionate about this new adventure, and it is now my full time profession.” With the help of her family, Giorgia found a beautiful bit of land in Cortona (Tuscany), where she was born, and it’s here that she tends to the grapes that go into her own label: Signora Ginni. In September 2021, she completed her first harvest - an opportunity to apply all she had learned from Danilo at Conestabile della Staffa. And the resulting wines are truly outstanding.

“Each wine I release is inspired and named after notable women, past and present,” Giorgia explains. “And the mannequin design on the label is a callback to my experience in fashion. My intent is to link the artisanal way of making wine to a handmade sartorial dress.” Enigma 2021, for example, is an easy-drinking Sangiovese red that takes its name from the first Italian drag queen, Raoul ‘Enigma‘ Pagnanelli (born in 1896). Vivienne 2021 is a crisp orange wine made with 50% Trebbiano Toscano and 50% Malvasia, and is named after Vivienne Westwood, the revolutionary British designer whose avant-garde styles in the 70s and 80s changed the way women dress. “She stands out the same way an orange wine does in Tuscany, where more classic wines are the norm,” explains Giorgia. Edie 2021 is a beautifully elegant rosato inspired by Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol’s muse in the 60s factory days. “Being a model, one may presume that there was not much beneath the surface, but in fact she had a very complex life,” says Giorgia. “I find this rosé to be initially very easygoing and light, but give it time to breathe a bit and you will find the earth, sapidity, and a great wild fruitiness.” Ventura 2021, a supremely refreshing sparkling orange wine, is the only release which isn’t named after a woman. “It’s called Ventura because it was the first wine that I bottled,” says Giorgia, knowing full well that a natural sparkling orange wine is as anti-establishment as it gets in this part of Tuscany. “It derives from Latin and means destiny… or things to come.” Like so many natural winemakers in Italy, Giorgia is an outsider in a region still dominated by mass-production conventional winemaking. But like an artisan in the truest sense of the word, she is taking on the fast-fashion world of conventional winemaking, one handcrafted bottle of natural wine at a time.