Oria Harvest 2025:
Precision, Essence and Community

There are moments in wine that cannot be manufactured. They only arrive if you have made a thousand correct decisions beforehand. The 2025 harvest was one of those moments.

On October 7, at six in the morning, the first Oria members crossed the stone gate of Val d'Orcia with empty wooden crates. There was low fog over the vines. The thermometer read 8°C. Roberto Cipresso was already in the first plot, examining a cluster of Sangiovese with the magnifying glass he always carries in his apron pocket.

"This year the skin is perfect," he said. "Thin where it should be, thick where it should be. The dry summer with the cool August nights did exactly what we needed."

The most difficult decision

In viticulture, the exact moment of harvest is the most important decision of the year. Too early and the wine is green, angular, lacking depth. Too late and the alcohol rises, the freshness is lost. There is a point — an exact point — where the balance is perfect.

Roberto found it on October 7. After weeks of analyzing seeds, skin and pulp separately. After daily walks through each plot of the vineyard. "You don't reach that point with data," he explained to the members as they worked. "You reach it with years of conversation with these specific vines."

Forty hands in the vineyard

Twenty Oria members — from Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Milan, São Paulo and Munich — worked for three days on the harvest. Not as tourists. As owners. Because that is what they are.

They cut the clusters with shears, set them gently into the 15 kg crates, debated with Roberto about which clusters deserved to come in and which should stay on the vine. "The beginner's first instinct is to take everything," said Roberto. "The winegrower's instinct is to leave what is not ready."

At the end of the first day, with purple hands and backs grateful for rest, the members gathered around the long table of the cortile. The previous year's wine, unsalted Tuscan bread, oil from the estate's century-old olive trees. Roberto spoke for an hour about what they had harvested that day. No one checked their phone.

The numbers of the 2025 harvest

The 2025 harvest was remarkable in quantity and exceptional in quality. The dry summer reduced the yield per hectare by 18% compared to the average, concentrating the sugars and polyphenols in smaller, more perfect fruit. "When the vine suffers moderately, it does the work for us," Roberto explained.

The first fermentation began on October 9 in the ovoid cement vats. Roberto's dissociation technique — fermenting skins, pulp and seeds separately — began to reveal, already in the first days, the aromatic complexity of the harvest: black cherry, violet, and a mineral base that only the Galestro of Val d'Orcia gives.

A community that works

There is something that transforms a person when they harvest their own land. It is not romanticism. It is responsibility. The Oria members who were there in October returned to their cities with a different relationship to wine. Not as consumers. As authors.

The Oria 2025 will be ready for the first allocation bottles in autumn 2026. By then, each member will know exactly which plot it came from, which morning they harvested it and at what temperature that day dawned in Val d'Orcia.

"The best wine is not the most expensive. It is the one with a story that belongs to whoever drinks it." — Roberto Cipresso

The Oria 2026 harvest is open to members. If you want to be part of the next vintage, talk to Giulia.