2018 Podere Il Carnasciale 'Il Caberlot' MAGNUM

'Il Caberlot' occupies a singular place in Italian wine. It is not a Super Tuscan in the conventional sense, nor a Bordeaux-style blend made from familiar varieties. It is the pure expression of Caberlot, a rare spontaneous crossing with the character of Cabernet Franc and Merlot, discovered in the 1960s and brought to its highest form by Podere Il Carnasciale.

The estate’s story is inseparable from the vision of Wolf and Bettina Rogosky, who transformed a remote Tuscan property into one of Italy’s most quietly prestigious wine projects. In the hills of Val d’Arno di Sopra, between the Tuscan Apennines and the Chianti area, they released the first vintage in 1989. From the beginning, the wine was conceived outside the usual categories: rare, exacting, profoundly individual and produced in extremely limited quantities.

The magnum format is central to the identity of Il Caberlot. This is not simply a larger bottle, but the natural home of the wine: a format that enhances its capacity for slow evolution, preserves freshness, and gives its structure the time and space to unfold. Each magnum feels less like a release and more like an allocation, a bottle made for cellars, serious tables and collectors who understand scarcity.

In the glass, Il Caberlot combines the aromatic lift and savoury tension associated with Cabernet Franc with the depth, texture and roundness of Merlot. It is a wine of dark fruit, fine spice, polished tannins and Tuscan restraint, but its real value lies in the way it resists easy comparison. It does not try to imitate Bordeaux or Bolgheri. It stands apart.

The result is one of Italy’s most distinctive cult wines: elegant, powerful, limited and unmistakably its own. Il Caberlot Magnum is a bottle for those who collect not only prestige, but singularity: a rare wine from a rare grape, shaped by one estate, one family vision and one of Tuscany’s most original viticultural stories.

2019 was a composed and highly complete vintage. After a cooler start to the season, summer developed with warmth but without damaging excess, followed by a favourable September and strong day-night temperature shifts. In Il Caberlot, this translates into a wine of precision and authority: ripe dark fruit, freshness, firm but polished tannins and the kind of balance that makes the magnum format particularly compelling for long ageing. A fitting vintage for the 30th anniversary of this iconic wine.

A great companion with steaks and slow-cooked preparations, as well as more delicate meats such as lamb and duck. Aged cheeses 

Serve: 16–18 °C
Drink: 2026-2049