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Banfi launches exclusive ‘Brunello Club’ with just 50 members

05 April 2023 By Sarah Neish

Italian producer Banfi tells db about the Brunello Ambassador Club it has created to reward those who have supported the winery from the beginning.

Premium Italian winery Castello Banfi, which owns vineyards in Montalcino, Bolgheri, Piemonte and Chianti Classico, revealed to the drinks business that it has established a VIP members club to say thank you to its early supporters.

The club is designed for “historical guests who believed in Banfi since the very beginning,” said Lorella Carresi, PR and communications manager for Banfi.

“We were nobody at the start. We built everything from scratch. And there were some restaurants, for example, in Italy, who supported the project from the start, and we wanted to reward them in some way.”

There are currently just 50 members in the highly exclusive club, with only Italian members admitted into its folds, but Banfi plans to open the club up to other countries from next year.

“It’s about building a community,” Carresi told db. “The members are not competitors, but they do speak with one another.”

For those initiated into the club, there will be “special opportunities and experiences” afforded to them at Banfi’s winery estate that are not accessible by normal guests.

An official opening ceremony will take place for club members on 5 June. According to Carresi, there were plans to launch the club in 2020 but the timing was not right due to the pandemic.

She added that Banfi is “not ruling out commercialising the club in future.”

The move to launch the Brunello Ambassador Club follows a change in the brand’s governance model to ensure “cultural continuity.”

Earlier this year, Banfi’s oenologist Marica Mencarelli told db: “Quality is fundamental. It is our goal, what we have always worked for, and we will continue to work for. Intuition and tasting cannot be a single monitoring element but must always be supported by precise and in-depth analyses. For us who do a long period of ageing in wood, for example, the role of oxygen in wines is increasingly important, and we also need to keep the sulphur levels lower.”

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