The winery in the dunes
“You have to be a bit foolhardy in order to salvage hundred-year old vines and fight the mistral and sandy soil to produce a modern wine from an ancient tradition”.
Tenuta La Sabbiosa stands looking out onto the sea of Sardinia on the island of Sant’Antioco. An “island within an island” which, until the eighties, was carpeted with tiny Carignano vineyards. Small particles of sapling vines, bred “like gardens” to the beaches, between the dunes and junipers, on sandy soils lashed all year round by the strong and saline mistral winds.
The vines are pre-phylloxera because this is one of the few parts in Europe where the terrible scourge of phylloxera failed to take root, destroying hundreds of years of human toil.
However, the wine-growing tradition mostly died out at the end of the eighties when low yield failed to keep up with market economics. Thousands of monumental vines unique to the world, with a hundred and more years of age, have been eradicated. Since the dawn of time, in fact, the vineyards here are processed and regenerated with ancient techniques that allow to keep the plants alive for centuries.
Here and there, however, thanks to the passion and tenacity of the elderly, small plots survived and from one of these began the production of the wines “Tenuta La Sabbiosa”. Over the years, other centuries-old vineyards have been saved from extinction and have joined the constantly growing property.
The enological intent of the company has always been to return to the essence of the Carignano: “an exceptional wine because the plant from which it derives has suffered thirst, heat, wind and maybe even a little hunger” said G. Tachis “a wine with low acidity and very high pH, rich in sweet noble tannics, round, polite that ages slowly and gently, as well as the great sages.”
That’s why Tenuta la Sabbiosa, despite the yields are inevitably very low, resumed working the centuries-old vineyards of the area, to obtain with traditional techniques and the best of modern knowledge, unique wines, with scents and flavours that can be given only by pre-phylloxera vineyards that grow near the sea, on soils composed of 99% sand. Lands that starve plants thirsty by the Sardinian sun and slapped by the mistral: “the plant that slightly suffers always gives a better wine” Emile Peynaud.
The winery uses electricity from renewable sources, packaging with the lowest environmental impact and the furniture was obtained from recovery and recycling materials.
And it’s always the nature to inspire our labels: numbered according to the birth of our wines, they follow the mathematical series by Fibonacci, as it happens in many natural shapes, a sequence where each number is the sum of the previous numbers: 1,1,2,3,5...