il Signor Kurtz Settantasette

About il Signor Kurtz Settantasette

il Signor Kurtz Settantasette is a complex Umbrian Sangiovese. At one point joyful and carefree but also dark and nervy. A wine for the angst-ridden.

About il Signor Kurtz

“il Signor Kurtz”, a reference to the antagonist in Joseph Conrad’s literary classic Heart of Darkness, is the wine-vision and quasi-alter-ego of one of Italy’s most thoughtful, capable, and exciting next-generation winemakers: Marco Durante. Marco has a small vineyard at his home in the small village of Vallupina, on a hill near Lake Trasimeno in Umbria. After spending much of his adult life, as Marco puts it, as “a wine enthusiast, as a taster, even a scribbler and sometimes a divulger”, he shed the shackles of his day job and knocked on the door of Danilo Marcucci at Conestabile della Staffa and pleaded with Danilo to take him under his wing. He was Danilo’s right-hand man for a number of years.

”il Signor Kurtz” is Marco’s introduction to the world as a headliner in his own right, though performed with Marco’s trademark humbleness toward the power of nature, the voice of the grapes, and spontaneous decision making based on the conditions of fermentation (and his own emotions at the time). Marco has a distaste for the predictable and the banal. He wants to let the wines sing with their own energy. He embraces tradition, yet leaves himself unchained by it to propel his winemaking into the future.

His winemaking is totally natural – spontaneous fermentation, aging in neutral vessels, no sulfur additions, and no filtering or fining.