Biography
The firm was born in 1971 when Arnaldo Caprai, a textile entrepreneur with a small industrial empire at Serrafoligno, purchased an agricultural property in nearby Montefalco, Val di Maggio. The property practiced a mixed agriculture, but also had six or seven acres of vineyards. An unusually gifted businessman, Arnaldo Caprai always gave the maximum attention not only to volume and profits, but also to the cultural aspects of his activities: over the years he had put together Italy’s largest collection of embroidery, lace, old handkerchiefs, and fans which he used to organize exhibitions of great interest. He had acquired the vineyards of Val di Maggio with the same spirit: Montefalco is the home of an old grape variety, Sagrantino, a grape which, since the Middle Ages, had always given wines of great intensity and noble structure. The small vineyard which he had purchased was located in the heart of the most promising part of the zone: Torre. But, at the time, Sagrantino was a virtually unknown wine outside of Umbria; it needed a quality producer who was also capable of given it a certain image and fame.
Caprai had this ambition, but needed someone to put it into practice. He found the professional figure he needed in his son Marco, to whom the fortunes of the estate were entrusted in 1988. Rarely has the passage from generation to generation been so successful: the vital energy which Marco Caprai has given to Val di Maggio has surpassed every conceivable prevision. His was the decision, for example, to began a period of collaboration with agricultural faculty of the University of Milan, which has enabled him to create the greatest existing data bank on the Sagrantino grape. Working with passion and commitment, but with meditated choices as well, taken after consultation with major experts in every sector, the young, but tenacious, entrepreneur has not limited his work to the success of his own property but has created a new interest in the territory and its wines in all of the world’s major markets for wine. He has succeeded in creating the image of a wine linked to tradition, but realized with the most modern cellar technology available, powerful and structured but up-to-date and contemporary, round, supple, elegant, with velvety tannins. With 350 acres of vineyards, Caprai now produces 750,00 bottles of wine annually: the line consists of ten wines, but the pride of the firm is its Sagrantino. It excels, in particular, in the dry type, an important and long-lived red wine produced in two versions: Collepiano and the Riserva 25 Anni.