196, the new Podere Conca label is a 100% Cabernet Sauvignon

We present 196 IGT Costa Toscana, a single-variety wine born with the 2022 harvest.

Silvia Cirri, who with her friend and partner Livio Aloisi is the producer of Podere Conca, is passionate about single-varietal wines; it was therefore natural for her to choose Cabernet Sauvignon to vinify in purity for the new 196 , just as he had chosen the Cabernet Franc vinified in purity for Apistόs, our long-aging cru.

The Tulips

Our young oenologist and agronomist Linda Franceschi, to whom we entrusted the project, chose to vinify and refine the 196 in tulipes, non-vitrified concrete containers that owe their name to the fact that they have a shape similar to that of tulips.

Linda says: “The idea was to create a young, fresh, pleasant and smooth wine to accompany the other more structured and mature wines already produced by our cellar.”

The must is then fermented in contact with the skins for about 8 days, at a temperature of 22/24°C, and daily hand-pressed. It is then refined in cement for another 8 months and in the bottle for 2.

Why the name 196?

The name corresponds to the street number on Via Bolgherese, also known as the Wine Road, the address of the Podere and home of the Cirri family, but at the same time also the center and soul of the company and a point of reference for all its activities.

The label

To design and create the label we chose the illustrator Francesca Santi of Colorcoleottero . We gave her the input to think of a label that could speak to a mainly young audience, that contains an image of tulips, because flowers are the recurring motif of our labels, and possibly also a reference to the tulips and/or the red windows of our Podere, those that are also represented in our logo.

Francesca has developed a long series of proposals that we have begun to discuss and that have left us a bit undecided.

Until, following a suggestion from Virginia, Silvia's daughter, a marketing expert who is attending a Master in Wine Business Management at the University of Trieste, we showed the bottles with the different label proposals to a sample of people of various ages and professions in Tuscany and Milan, asking them which was their favourite.

The choice was almost unanimous.

And it fell on a Tuscan landscape with red tulips and the umbrella pine that shades one of our vineyards that Francesca, the illustrator, imagines she can admire from the window of the Podere.

“The concept I wanted to convey with this label – says Francesca – is the one that concerns the experience of drinking a glass of wine, which is not a physiological need, but rather it is a moment of indulgence and taking the best of both drinking wine and the environment that surrounds us. For this reason I imagined the label as a window on a piece of the world, in particular on the wonderful nature that surrounds the entire Podere Conca”

Here is an IGT Costa Toscana of 13.5% alcohol by volume with an intense and lively red colour, an exuberant nose with fruity and vegetal notes and a fresh acidity in the mouth.

by Silvia Cirri and Linda Franceschi