Borgo Scopeto wedding

The estate sits on a ridge in the Chianti Classico vineyards east of Siena, in the comune of Castelnuovo Berardenga.

It is two things joined: a medieval hamlet with a square tower, and Villa Il Giardino, the eighteenth-century house beside it. Between them they hold 52 rooms and suites, and around them run the vineyards that make the estate’s Chianti Classico.

From the lawn on a clear day you can see Siena across the hills. That view is the estate’s signature and it is the reason the ceremony happens where it does.

The relais is taken whole, so the weekend moves between the hamlet, the villa and the gardens around them.

The lawn below the villa, where the ceremony goes, with a pergola set against the Chianti hills and Siena in the distance.

Ninety square metres under a five-metre ceiling, with an antique fireplace and panoramic windows. Licensed for a civil ceremony and seating 50 theatre style.

The restaurant, and the wet-weather plan. It seats exactly 100, which is the number the whole guest list should be drawn against.

Where a marquee goes if the party runs past a hundred. It needs a covered tunnel with it, which is a detail worth knowing before the quote arrives.

A Borgo Scopeto wedding starts from €250,000, and for optimal results we recommend budgeting €350,000 all-in for 90 to 130 guests.

Priced per day, with all 52 rooms and suites included at two guests a room:

• 1–30 April and 16–31 October: €37,000 a day, two nights minimum
• 1 May – 15 June and 16 September – 15 October: €41,000 a day, two nights minimum
• 16 June – 15 September: €47,000 a day, three nights minimum

The summer band is both the most expensive and the longest, so a July wedding costs €141,000 in hire against €74,000 for one in April.

The relais requires one group function for everyone attending on each day of the rental, which is what turns a two-night hire into a two-event weekend.

Beverage packages run from about €19 to about €50 a head with VAT, rising through the estate’s own Chianti Classico to a Brunello and a rosé champagne at the top. Menus are quoted against the brief rather than published.

The tourist tax at €5 a head per day for the first seven nights, waived for children under fourteen. Extra beds at €40 for children between four and eleven and €80 from twelve up.

Any chairs, tables, settings or equipment needed for a wedding above a hundred guests are hired in, because the relais does not hold them.

The comune of Castelnuovo Berardenga has granted Borgo Scopeto a licence for civil ceremonies.

That means a couple can be legally married on the estate, outdoors in the garden or inside Sala Del Caminetto, with no separate trip to a town hall and no symbolic workaround. Most of the great Chianti estates cannot offer it, and couples spend a morning of their wedding in a municipal office as a result.

We would build the day around it. The legal ceremony in the garden with Siena on the horizon is a better hour than the same ceremony in a council chamber, and it gives the afternoon back to the wedding.

La Tinaia seats a hundred, and that single number governs the shape of the whole wedding.

At a hundred guests or fewer, the wet-weather plan is a room that already exists and nothing needs to be built. Above a hundred, a marquee becomes compulsory, and if it goes on the main lawn the relais also requires a covered tunnel to connect it.

So the step from 100 guests to 101 is not one more chair. It is a structure, a tunnel, two days of build and a hire bill for everything inside it, and none of that appears in the sole-use rate.

The relais sleeps 130, which makes it tempting to fill. We would rather hold the list at a hundred and keep the whole budget pointed at the wedding.

The hamlet is taken whole, it stands in open vineyard country, and the nearest neighbour is some way off.

Those three facts are the argument, and they are a good one. Every guest on the property is at the wedding, and the usual reason an estate stops the music early is a person trying to sleep who was not invited.

What governs on top of that is the comune, because Tuscan municipalities have ordinances of their own. We agree the finishing hour with the relais against the date, write it into the contract before anything is signed, and arrange the SIAE licence alongside it.

Fifty-two rooms and suites, sleeping 130, all of them inside the sole-use rate.

They are divided between the medieval hamlet and Villa Il Giardino, so there is a genuine choice between a room in the borgo with the square outside the door and a room in the villa with the garden below it. Families take the villa; the hamlet suits everyone else.

Because the rate already covers all 52, there is no saving in booking fewer, and no guest has to be told they are staying elsewhere. For a wedding of this size that is unusual and it removes most of the logistics other estates create.

The estate is at Borgo Scopeto in the comune of Castelnuovo Berardenga, in the province of Siena, inside the Chianti Classico zone.

Siena is 23 minutes away, which is the shortest run to a great city of any estate on this list.

Florence Peretola is an hour and 29 minutes by road and Florence city centre an hour and 25. Pisa is two hours and 17, Perugia an hour and 51 and Rome Fiumicino three hours and 26.

Siena at 23 minutes changes what a weekend here can be. Guests arriving a day early have somewhere to go, and the couple can put the rehearsal dinner in the city without turning it into an expedition.

A hundred guests is the line, and it is drawn by a restaurant rather than a lawn.

Hold the list at a hundred.

La Tinaia seats exactly that. Above it the marquee is compulsory, the tunnel comes with it on the main lawn, and the hire bill for structure and furniture arrives on top of a sole-use rate that already includes 52 rooms. We always test whether the guests between 100 and 130 are worth what they cost, and usually they are not.

Use the civil ceremony licence.

The comune has licensed this estate, so the legal marriage can happen in the garden rather than in an office in town. It saves a morning, it removes a convoy, and it means the ceremony guests remember is also the one that counts. Very few Chianti estates can do it and almost nobody asks.

Put the rehearsal dinner in Siena.

Twenty-three minutes is close enough to make the city part of the weekend rather than a day trip. We would take the welcome dinner into Siena and keep the estate for the wedding itself, because the contrast is what guests remember and the drive is nothing.

Choose May or late September over July.

The summer band costs €47,000 a day and requires three nights; May and late September cost €41,000 and require two. That is a difference of €67,000 between a July wedding and a September one before anything else changes, for a month most people would say is better anyway.

Magic Day plans weddings at Borgo Scopeto from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the nights and the whole relais, the guest list tested against the hundred-seat wet-weather plan, the civil ceremony licence used rather than left on the table, the daily group function designed into a real weekend, the rehearsal dinner taken into Siena, the finishing hour agreed in writing and agreed against the date, and all 52 rooms allocated so that nobody is sleeping anywhere else.

We have worked Tuscany for years. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people are coming, and we will tell you what the days come to.