Petrolo – Galatrona 2021

If the Château La Croix was the honest benchmark, then the Galatrona from Petrolo is the statement. You notice it the moment you pour: color-wise, a completely different league, incredibly dense in the glass. Anyone who sees the two wines side by side doesn't need a tasting note to know that a different level of ambition is at play here.

Petrolo is a small family estate in Val d'Arno di Sopra, a subzone east of Chianti that has made a name for itself with international varieties. The Bazzocchi-Sanjust family acquired the property in the 1940s; today Luca Sanjust runs the estate in the third generation, after giving up his career as an artist in Rome in 1993 and returning home. Galatrona, his flagship, was first bottled in 1994: 100% Merlot from a single vineyard planted between the late 1980s and mid-1990s with low-vigor Bordeaux clones. Around 50,000 vines stand on approximately ten hectares with southeast exposure at roughly 300 meters elevation. The soil – clay-loam with schist, marl, and sandstone – retains the moisture that Merlot needs during the hot Tuscan summers. Since 2016, the estate has been organically certified and farmed without irrigation.

In the cellar, Petrolo takes a deliberately restrained approach: hand-harvesting with sorting, spontaneous fermentation with indigenous yeasts in glass-lined cement tanks, gentle manual extraction, malolactic fermentation in wood, then 18 to 20 months of aging in French barriques and tonneaux, roughly one-third of which are new. This is not a wine that aims to impress through 100% new oak or aggressive extraction, but one that relies on fruit, precision, and terroir.

The 2021 vintage was not easy in Toskana either. Spring frost and summer drought reduced production at Petrolo by around 30 percent below normal levels. However, the grapes that made it through the vintage reached optimal ripeness – and the analytical data show it: 14% alcohol with 5.89 g/l total acidity and pH 3.56. This means the 2021 is analytically even fresher in acidity than the 2019 and 2020 vintages – a combination of concentration and freshness that is immediately noticeable in the glass.

And that is exactly how the wine tastes. On the palate, it is absolutely mouth-filling, with the finest nougat and a delicate juniper that lends the wine an almost Mediterranean herbal note. The oak is beautifully integrated – present but never dominant, which is no surprise given the moderate proportion of new wood. The tannins are fine but still youthful, and behind the dense, dark fruit lies a freshness that gives the wine an unusual verticality for Merlot. 97 points – one of the best single-varietal Merlots in the world, in my opinion.

Several months after the Merlot tasting, I opened another bottle in December 2025 – this time alongside the Fattoria Le Pupille Saffredi 2022, a Bordeaux blend with a slight Cabernet Sauvignon predominance. The Galatrona performed superbly, especially at the start: so much fruit, so much power, mouth-enveloping richness, and a wonderful bloody aftertaste. Also surprisingly a lot of tannin – more than I had remembered. I had given it slightly less air than the Saffredi, which made it seem more youthful and powerful at first. With more air and rising temperature, the Saffredi then showed its strengths and pulled ahead of the Galatrona (98+ for the Saffredi). Galatrona confirmed at 97 points – but with a great deal of potential. It would not surprise me if it reaches 99 points one day.

International critics see it similarly: Falstaff awards 100 points, James Suckling 98, Wine Enthusiast 97, Vinous 98, Decanter and Parker 97 and 97+ respectively. That this wine is still available for around 100 euros borders on an oversight, given the prices for comparably rated Bordeaux or the more famous Tuscan neighbor Masseto. After the modest benchmark from Pomerol, we now have a wine in the picture that embodies true world class. The question is no longer whether Greek Merlots can beat Pomerol – that would be too easy. The question is how close they can get to the Galatrona.