Italy » Tuscany » Montepulciano

Montepulciano wine tasting & lunch: 6 wines in a historic cellar

★★★★★★★★★★ 4.80 (292 reviews) 88% rated it 5 stars

Free cancellationTravelers' pick

1/15

Duration1h

GroupUp to 15

LanguagesEN · IT

Mobile ticketAccepted

Six wines in tunnels older than Rome, bruschetta included

You descend into a centuries-old cellar carved from tufa stone, taste six classified Montepulciano wines, and walk through underground tunnels where fossils mark the site's ancient origins. Bruschetta with local olive oil is included, and your guide explains the barrel aging and winemaking philosophy that defines the region. The cellar sits in Montepulciano's car-free center, so plan parking nearby and allow two hours for the full experience.

Step-by-step itinerary

Explore Slavonian oak barrels
See French wood tonneaux and barriques
Walk through ancient tufa tunnels
Taste bruschetta with olive oil
Taste six DOC and DOCG wines

The Experience

The moment you step into the cellar, the temperature drops and the air shifts — it's cooler, older, and you realize the stone walls around you are actual tufa, dug out by hand centuries ago. The cellar sits buried beneath Montepulciano's center, and the tunnels themselves are so old that fossils have turned up in the sandy walls. It's not a polished tasting room; it's a working cellar where thousands of hectolitres of Vino Nobile di Montepulciano rest in enormous Slavonian oak barrels, row after row, some of them so massive you have to step around them to move through the space.

The tasting itself includes six wines — usually a Supertuscan, a Nobile, and a Nobile Riserva among them, all DOC or DOCG classified — and they arrive with bruschetta topped with local extra-virgin olive oil. Your guide walks you through the cellar's layout: the main barrel room with its French tonneaux and barriques, then deeper into those tunnels where the light gets dimmer and the history feels less like a story and more like something you're standing inside. The whole experience leans on the philosophy that great red wines need time, wood, and the right conditions — all of which are literally built into the stone around you. Groups stay small, which means you're not shuffling through with thirty other people.

The cellar is in the heart of Montepulciano, which is a no-car zone, so you'll need to park at either Parking S. Donato or Parking P8 and walk in — that's a few minutes on foot, but it keeps the old town intact. A minimum of two people per booking, and children under six aren't suited to the tour, mainly because of the narrow passages and the focus on wine rather than family activities. The whole visit takes a couple of hours, and you leave with a clearer sense of why Tuscan wine tastes the way it does and why people have been making it in these exact tunnels for so long.

What’s included

Cellar tour through historic underground tufa tunnels, tasting of six Vino Nobile di Montepulciano wines (DOC and DOCG), bruschetta with extra-virgin olive oil, and a guide explaining the barrel aging and winemaking philosophy of the region.

Good to know

Easy physical level

Operated by Umbria con Me

Is this one for you?Right for wine lovers and history buffs who want to taste serious Tuscan reds in the place they're actually made, without the drive to a distant estate — the cellar's location in Montepulciano's center and its ancient tunnels are what make the tasting feel grounded in real time and place.