Thirty years ago, a regular customer at the Rosenthal Wine Merchant retail shop
presented Neal a bottle of 1985 Montefalco Rosso Riserva from Paolo Bea—a wine
he had brought back in his luggage because he wanted so much to share it with him.
Neal, no stranger to that sort of pitch, wasn’t expecting much, but the bottle so ignited
his imagination that he built in a trip to Umbria a few weeks down the road to make
the acquaintance of Giampiero, Paolo’s young son. The rest, as they say, is history,
and Giampiero—both through his own deeply personal wines and his wide-ranging
influence—has become a cornerstone of our family of growers. Building on the work
of his father—a through-and-through farmer whose Umbrian dialect is so thick as
to be nearly incomprehensible to outsiders—Giampiero realized what made Paolo’s
wines so special and built a philosophy around it: in a series of decades that saw
Italian winegrowers enthusiastically embrace modern technology, Giampiero—as
co-founder of the ViniVeri (“Real Wine”) group—advocated for respectful vineyard
work, biodiversity, a de-emphasis on technology in the cellar, nonengagement with
professional critics, and an overall trust in old agrarian wisdom.
Bea’s wines remain singular—boisterous, unabashedly wild expressions of their undulating, sun-drenched hills of origin, each new vintage of which is eagerly anticipated by a legion of loyal clients. Giampiero’s wines always proudly display their
vintage: he pointedly resists striving for a consistent “product” from year to year, and
the wines are bottled when they’re deemed ready rather than according to some
schedule. Giampiero relies on patience, and plenty of it, and what is in the bottle is
always a full-on reflection of the fruit and the story of the season that birthed it.