Tenuta Licinia

Tenuta Licinia is a small producer in Tuscany that specializes in identifying small historic and high potential vineyards and bringing them back to life. Tenuta Licinia was founded with the idea of bringing back to life historic vineyards with interesting subsoils in a part of Tuscany where fine wine production largely disappeared in the 20th century.

The winery is situated near the village of Lucignano, a small hilltop village on the northern edge of the Valdichiana. As an Etrucan area, Lucignano has a long history of wine production – which largely died out in the 20th century. One of the aims of Tenuta Licinia is to bring fine wine production back to the village and the surrounding area. Down in the Valdichiana valley, the soils are less interesting – deep and fertile subsoils that produce thin wines with less territorial identity.

Lucignano and the Valdichiana’s geology becomes more interesting from the winemaking perspective when you leave the valley floor and sharply rise into a series of jagged and rocky hills.These higher hills are a patchwork of terroirs that change every radically every 50-100m. But even in these zones, most of the subsoils are not interesting. Despite this, within this quickly changing geology there are some incredible subsoils.. This quickly changing nature of geology makes it crucial to select very specific confined areas to grow high level wines.

Jacques de Liedekerke, starting in the 1970s, planned to bring back one particular plot that he had identified. It took him thirty years to prepare the project and finally replant the Sasso di Fata vineyard in 2006. In 2020, his grandson James Marshall became the winemaker and started farming the first Sangiovese plot, Montalceto, a tiny one-hectare plot nearly 20km from the winery. We now have just 6.5 Ha of vines and alongside that there are 60Ha of forest.