Great stories of excellence are always made by special men.

Special men who create special company culture.

Of course the great lawyer Mastrojanni – who unfortunately I was never able to meet – must have been a man of clear vision and courage. 

He came to Montalcino in 1975 and immediately decided to make a wine that would have made history.  As he got older he found help in his children and the young Andrea Machetti who took the reins of the company in 1992 transforming it into one of the most highly respected producers in Montalcino.   

Andrea is a man of few words and by now knows each of the estate’s vines perfectly.  He knows how to grow them and make them feel good bringing ripe fruit year after year because he is there, always there, following every single detail, from a barrel which needs to be replaced or planed to a plant in need of help.   

And he knows that this is the only way to make a fine wine: to be at its beck and call.  

In those days, already a friend for a long time with Andrea, the poet and winemaker Maurizio Castelli arrived. A world famous winemaker for his fine wines, Maurizio is like Andrea and like the rest of us a “non-interventionist”: he tries to leave the wine to carry out its own evolution, dictated by its own nature.  

But it is clear that a winemaker is like a doctor, and he has to know when there is a problem and how to cure it.  His trick, like that of the best doctors, is “prevention”.  Or rather working in a preventative fashion, through a careful and continuous presence in the winery and systematically controlling in order to protect the wine from any possible “colds” that might attack it.  

In this way, thanks to the set up created by Andrea and Maurizio, Mastrojanni wines are free from those rather common interventions which make a wine more “constructed” than “natural”.