Quando l’arte del vino diventa un ‘nobile’ stile di vita

Villa Cusona was presented as the historic headquarters of Tenute Guicciardini Strozzi, with documented origins in 994 and an estate extending across approximately 530 hectares. Its vineyards included Vernaccia di San Gimignano and other white varieties alongside Sangiovese, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon.

The profile traced the Fattoria Guicciardini complex to the second half of the fifteenth century, when San Gimignano’s second wall circuit was enlarged to include the Church and Convent of Sant’Agostino. After serving variously as homes and workshops, the buildings became an agricultural fattoria from the eighteenth century to the 1950s. The complex contained granaries, vat rooms, stables, a carpenter’s shop and a ground-floor olive mill.

The Strozzi property passed into the Guicciardini family in 1877 as Princess Luisa Strozzi’s dowry when she married Count Francesco Guicciardini, already the owner of Cusona. The enterprise then comprised around fifteen farms near San Gimignano and extensive woodland. Francesco modernized the business in the early twentieth century, while Girolamo Strozzi later founded and became the first president of the Vernaccia consortium and developed international sales with his wife and daughters. The profile also identified Cusona 1933, Sòdole and Millanni among the estate’s emblematic labels, with Millanni first presented from the 1994 vintage to mark Cusona’s millennium.