Tuscany in Bloom

Vineyard estates, Chianti Classico and the season of the iris — the case for April in the country between Florence and Siena.

There is a Tuscany of late summer, the parched-gold one of the photographs, and there is a Tuscany of April that almost no visitor sees. The April Tuscany is green — properly green, a green that the rest of the year does not produce — and it is wet underfoot, and the wisteria climbs the loggias in long blue ribbons, and the irises that the Florentines have grown for their perfume since the time of the Medici come into a brief, almost hallucinatory bloom in the third week of the month. It is the Tuscany the Sienese painters knew, before it was the Tuscany of anyone else.

The Country Between Two Cities

Most of what visitors mean by Tuscany — the rolling hills, the cypress alleys, the stone farmhouses on the ridges — lies in the country between Florence and Siena. The Chianti Classico zone occupies most of it, running roughly from Greve in the north to Castelnuovo Berardenga in the south, and it remains, for our money, one of the great agricultural landscapes in Europe. It is also, importantly, a working landscape. The vineyards are not decorative; they are vineyards. The olive groves are not photographic backdrops; they are olive groves whose oil is pressed and sold each November. The towns — Radda, Castellina, Gaiole, Volpaia — are towns, with bakers and butchers and rather indifferent attitudes toward the visitor.

We base most week-long itineraries on a single estate within this country, with day trips to Florence and Siena and slightly longer outings to San Gimignano, Volterra, or south to the Val d'Orcia. The estates we choose for the most demanding clients are not, for the most part, the famous wine names. They are smaller properties — Castello di Vicarello, Borgo Santo Pietro, the Castello di Casole — that have been restored at the contemporary luxury standard while remaining, in feel, agricultural Tuscany.

Wine, At Its Source

Chianti Classico is, in 2026, in a period of considerable creative ambition. The recent introduction of the UGA — the Unità Geografiche Aggiuntive, the eleven sub-zones recognised on the label since 2023 — has given producers a new vocabulary for terroir, and the best of them are using it carefully. We arrange, for clients with a serious interest in the wines, vertical tastings at the small producers whose work most rewards attention: Isole e Olena under the new Epi ownership, Castell'in Villa under the long stewardship of Principessa Coralia Pignatelli, Monteraponi for the most rigorous expression of the Radda terroir, Castello di Volpaia for the broader range, Querciabella for the biodynamic example.

These are not, on the whole, the names that one finds in the airport shops. They are the names that are on the lists at Le Calandre, at Reale, at Cenobio dei Dogi. The visits we arrange to them are private, with the proprietor or estate director, and they are conversations rather than tastings. They are also, in April, possible — which by mid-July they are not.

The Iris and the Garden

The third week of April is the iris bloom in Florence, and it is one of the small, perfect things. The Giardino dell'Iris on the hillside above Piazzale Michelangelo opens for two weeks each spring; admission is free; the collection holds more than two thousand varieties; and the view from its upper terraces over the Arno valley is the view Florence likes best of itself. We always recommend a morning there for clients in residence the right week. Combined with a private opening of the Giardino di Boboli before the public visitors arrive, and a long lunch at Cibrèo or Trattoria Sostanza, it is a Tuscan day arranged at the highest pitch.

The country gardens, too, are at peak in April. The garden at La Foce in the Val d'Orcia, designed by Cecil Pinsent for Iris Origo in the 1920s, is among the most considered Italian gardens of the twentieth century, and a private visit with a horticulturist — the Origo family still owns and stewards it — is a particular pleasure for the garden-minded client.

The Slow Rhythm

A Tuscan week in April should not be over-planned. The country itself does most of the work. A morning in Florence, a country lunch at Solociccia in Panzano, an afternoon at home at the villa, a glass of Brunello at six, a long dinner cooked by the estate's chef — these are the days the country was made for. We arrange them, and then we leave the client largely alone. The most repeated note in the thank-you letters we receive is some version of: we did less than we expected to, and it was more than we had hoped for.