AZIENDA AGRICOLA

To me, natural means purity. Grace. Elegance.
With a responsibility, above all, to the land you’re farming.

The goal is to make fun and delicious wines that everyone can drink with ease and lightness…

Az. Agr. Summer Wolff is the culmination of decades of dreams, ideas, study, curiosity, travel, failures and successes all coming together.

Watching, working with, building and growing a winery together with my husband gave me inspiration and motivation for my import journey. I travelled Europe meeting small, young, and mostly unknown natural winemakers and learned about their stories, struggles, and accomplishments.

I day dreamt about what ‘my’ wine would be like, I quietly thought about what I may do differently after tasting wine after wine after wine. I honed in more and more after 20 years in the business on what makes my own palate tick… and finally a couple of years ago, with a nudge from my husband, decided it was time to make it.

It all started when I was waitressing in a small restaurant in Charleston South Carolina. I had been working in the food and bev industry throughout high school and college, and beyond, and was convinced opening my own restaurant was my future. In fact, I had all my marbles in that basket.

Then, at this SC restaurant, in walks a wine rep; a job I was very familiar with after having worked both as a bar manager and general manager. However, a part of the big intricate wheel of the restaurant biz that never directly regarded me. On this particular day, the rep asked the manager if he could taste the entire service staff on the new wines we would be selling to our guests to get our feedback. Now commonplace, back then it was very much less so the norm to get the staff involved in wine education. Fortunately I have seen this change 100% and it has been a brilliant part of the journey. This wine ‘guy’ poured us all a glass and asked us what we thought. Without much thought at all I rambled off what I was experiencing on an olfactory level. He looked at me surprised, and then grinned and chuckled and said; you have quite the nose, I think you are in the wrong business.

From that day on I realized this super sense of smell that I had always lived with could be a gift, and not just an almost (at times) prohibitive super sense. I moved back to NYC, started studying wine, got a job as an assistant sommelier at a major restaurant group in Times Square, and never looked back.

Flash forward through jobs as a wine director, head somm, marketing and export assistant at a Tuscan winery, a wine broker, a partner in a custom wine tour company in Tuscany, to a winemaker’s wife, and finally to importer… add motherhood and opening a Steiner school to the mix, and as of the fall of 2021, wine maker.

Watching, working with, building and growing a winery together with my husband gave me inspiration and motivation for my import journey. I travelled Europe meeting small, young, and mostly unknown natural winemakers and learned about their stories, struggles, and accomplishments. Hearing and learning about their hits and misses in order to help me be the best ambassador I could be for their estates in the US, obviously left a mark.

I day dreamt about what ‘my’ wine would be like, I quietly thought about what I may do differently after tasting wine after wine after wine. I honed in more and more after 20 years in the business on what makes my own palate tick… and what, as an entire movement, the natural wine world has learned with the emergence and I think surprising success of this new, and important category of wines.

Natural doesn’t mean the wine has to be cloudy with a cute and tongue in cheek label. Natural doesn’t mean the wine has to have too much VA or mouse. Natural doesn’t mean the wine has to be made with zero SO2 added. Natural doesn’t mean that you have to do every single natural wine fair near and far dressed in a cool tee shirt. Instead, to me, natural means purity. Grace. Elegance. Clean and individual. With a responsibility, above all, to the land you’re farming. It should be priced for everyone to be able to afford, and wine that everyone wants to drink. Needless to say;this is only my own perception of a category of wine, that I believe is also a lifestyle. Living naturally, raising our children naturally, nourishing our bodies with whole and clean foods, and of course, drinking only natural wines coming from terroir which is loved, cared for, and respected.

My goal in this project is to continue my devotion to taking care of our land in order to take care of our children and the future generations.

Said this, the goal is also to make a super fun and delicious wine that everyone can drink with ease and lightness, finishing the bottle and wanting another… that is the highest compliment a winemaker can receive!

For now I’ve only 2 hectares of land in the same valley as my husband's winery, Cascina Iuli, but I have plans of planting more… slowly, when the time is right.

Cheers,
Summer

For now I’ve only 2 hectares of land in the same valley as my husbands winery, Cascina Iuli and rented old vineyards of Freisa Piccola, but I have plans of planting more… slowly, when the time is right.