Bed & Breakfast
Tastings · Wine Dinner
We start with our family estate and widen out to two small growers we know well. All organic, all family-run, all with a story we’ll tell you at the table — even if you know nothing about wine.
The family estate
The wine we pour at the bistrot is made a few kilometres from here, on the hills between Siena and Chianti, on the Griccioli family estate. This isn’t a wine list assembled at a desk: it’s the family cellar, carried inside the castle walls.
Everything is farmed organically, with Tuscan grapes only — Sangiovese and rarities like Malvasia Nera — plus the Arteliquida range for the small-batch wines. The rest is down to the terroir of the Colli Senesi, which is the same landscape you see from the bedroom windows.
Friends of the house
If you only ever had our wine in the glass, you’d never understand this place. So alongside Montechiaro we pour just two other estates: small, organic, family-run, with the same idea of how to work a vineyard — but different grapes, different hills and a different result. That is part of what a tasting is for: putting two worlds side by side and tasting the gap.
Chianti Classico DOCG · since 1865
One of the historic houses of Chianti Classico, at Castellina in Chianti, making wine for over a hundred and sixty years. Pure Sangiovese with real depth: the annata, the Riserva and the Gran Selezione Vigne di Montornello. And then Bibbianaccio, a red that breaks the rules, where Sangiovese meets Colorino and a small share of white grapes — the way it used to be done.
Vernaccia di San Gimignano DOCG
On the other side of the valley, on the hills of San Gimignano, they make Vernaccia — one of Tuscany’s historic whites, and the first Italian wine ever granted a DOC. A small family estate working it as an annata and in the more serious Riserva, plus a Sangiovese rosé and a sparkling Vernaccia. The perfect counterweight to our reds.
The tastings
Each one is led by someone from our team — usually Francesca or Maurizio — who tells you what you’re drinking and where it comes from, and arrives at the table with a small board of local food. It runs thirty to forty-five minutes: long enough to understand something, short of turning it into a course.
Two glasses of your choice from our estate. The shortest way to learn what this hill tastes like.
Three glasses: the Chianti direct, the Riserva deeper, the Vinsanto to finish. The backbone of the family cellar, from the simplest to the sweetest.
Three glasses: Arteliquida Bianco, Vernaccia and Vernaccia Riserva. Roundness on one side, and on the other that salty tension only Vernaccia has. Two opposite ways of making white wine in Tuscany.
Four glasses from the Arteliquida range and Primum Vinum: the wines where the estate takes its risks.
Four glasses crossing the different Sienese terroirs, from our own hills to our friends’.
Four glasses of the same grape, Sangiovese: Colli Senesi against Chianti Classico, vintages against riservas. One grape, four different characters. The serious one.
Every wine is organic. If a bottle wins you over, take it home: at the counter you can drink it and buy it.
Francesca told us the story of the wine we were about to taste, so that even we, complete beginners, could pick up the nuances.Denise P. · Tripadvisor, August 2025
The Wine Dinner
A dinner where the wine doesn’t accompany the food: it leads it. Three glasses poured one at a time and introduced at your table by one of us, ending the Tuscan way with cantucci dipped in Vinsanto — always included. Choose your evening: the wines of our own estate, or a journey into Chianti Classico with the great reds of Bibbiano.
Tenuta di Montechiaro — our family estate alone
Water and espresso included · €90 for two
Montechiaro & Bibbiano — two estates
Water and espresso included · €100 for two
Where you drink
Taste wherever you like: at the counter in front of the wine wall, in the room inside — carved out of the oldest part of the building, cool stone, low light, the quiet of a cellar — or at the tables outside on the castle square, which in the afternoon is the best seat of all.
In the afternoon, outside mealtimes, you can come just for a glass or a tasting, with no meal at all.
Not only wine
Wine is our mother tongue, but not the only one. At the counter and at the tables on the square you will also find farmhouse beer, Tuscan gins and the soft drinks of a family firm bottling since 1900.
Organic farmhouse beer · Crete Senesi
Italy’s first certified organic farmhouse brewery, at Podere del Pereto in Rapolano Terme. They grow the grain themselves and turn it into beer: from the field to the tap with nothing in between. Unfiltered, unpasteurised. What’s on tap changes often — just ask.
Six bottles · all Tuscan
Six bottles on the counter, chosen one by one. Arcipelago, distilled with botanicals from the Tuscan archipelago; I’ Ginne, with juniper, rosemary and camomile from the Casentino; Elektro, yellow with saffron; Gin Iris by Acqua di Toscana; GUD, Tuscan too, dry and straight; and Sabatini 0.0, distilled Tuscan botanicals with no alcohol at all. We drink them neat and use them for cocktails.
Artisan sodas · Val d’Orcia
From San Quirico d’Orcia, since 1900, made with spring water from Monte Amiata: spuma, gassosa, cedrata, chinotto and the tonic that goes into our gin and tonics. People who don’t drink alcohol deserve something properly made too.
If you don’t know where to start, start with I Classici ’345: three glasses, twenty euros, and in half an hour you’ll know what wine is made around here. After that, we’ll see.
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