Dievole Wine Resort wedding

Dievole sits at the gates of the medieval village of Vagliagli, in the Chianti Classico hills north of Siena, on an estate of nearly 400 hectares.

The name is on record from 1090, and it is read as a contraction of “Dio vuole”, God willing. For most of the nine centuries since, this was a farm and a hamlet. Today it is a wine estate owned by the Bulgheroni family, and its Dievole Chianti Classico is the reason most people have heard the name before they arrive.

The resort is the hamlet restored. Villa Dievole holds the restaurant, and five old buildings around it hold the 32 rooms, with whitewash, terracotta tiles and stone sills kept as they were. Gardens fill the corners between them. Two panoramic pools and a lounge bar complete it.

We find it reads less like a hotel than like a family property that happens to have 32 bedrooms, which is exactly what a wedding of 70 wants.

A Dievole Wine Resort wedding takes everything at once: the rooms, the restaurant, both pools, the bar and the gardens. There is no second party and no outside guest in a bedroom.

The restaurant is in the historic villa, and in summer its tables move outdoors. It takes events of up to 72 guests, which is also the most the estate sleeps, so the dinner and the house are sized for each other. The kitchen serves contemporary Tuscan cooking built on local producers.

Walled lawns and terraces surround the villa and look out over the valley, and the lawn in front of the villa is where the ceremony goes. We set the aperitivo on the terrace above it so guests turn from the vows straight to the view.

Both panoramic pools and the bar are inside the wedding fee. They carry the days around the wedding rather than the night itself.

Pool parties are not part of a Dievole weekend, so the pools are for the afternoons, and we design the welcome evening elsewhere on the estate.

A Dievole Wine Resort wedding starts from €150,000, and for optimal results we recommend budgeting €250,000 all-in for 50 to 72 guests.

All 32 rooms are just under €16,000 a night, with breakfast, Wi-Fi, a wine tasting and VAT included. The figure is the same in April as in August. The minimum is two nights, and a city tax of €4 a person a night sits on top.

€4,000, which adds the restaurant, both pools, the lounge bar and the gardens for the wedding. Two nights and the fee come to just over €35,000; three nights, which is how we would plan it, just over €51,000.

The resort’s own kitchen caters, and every wedding takes at least two food and beverage events. The menus:

• Gala dinner with finger food, a starter, a first and a main course, wine and coffee: €170 a head, or €155 without the starter
• Tuscan barbecue: €90 a head
• Pizza party: €75 a head
• Open bar for three hours: just over €3,000 or just under €4,000 by the number of drinks
• Midnight snack of pizza and focaccia: €18 a head
• Wedding cake, a millefoglie assembled in front of the guests by the chef: from €600

For 72 guests the gala dinner is about €12,000. The rest of the Dievole Wine Resort wedding cost is everything a hotel does not supply: the marquee, the flowers, the music, the photographer and the transport.

Thirty-two double rooms in five restored buildings, from classic rooms to deluxe rooms and suites. Sixty-four guests sleep two to a room, and 72 with third beds.

The rooms are painted headboards, beamed ceilings and windows onto the vineyards, with freestanding baths in some of them. Suites have their own sitting rooms over the valley.

Every room is in the buyout, so the whole guest list wakes on the same hill and walks to breakfast.

We would give the suites to the families first.

Children under 12 stay during the buyout nights. Guests who extend their stay beyond the buyout can bring children from 12.

Dievole is at Vagliagli, in the comune of Castelnuovo Berardenga, in the province of Siena.

Siena is 35 minutes by road and its railway station 33. Florence city centre is an hour and 28.

Florence Peretola is the nearest airport, an hour and 36 minutes away. Pisa is two hours and 15, Bologna two hours and 23 and Perugia two hours and 8. Pisa and Bologna carry more direct flights from the UK than Florence, and Rome Fiumicino, three hours and 43, is the airport with direct flights from the United States.

The last stretch climbs through the Chianti hills between the vineyards, and we run coaches from Florence and Siena so guests arrive without driving after a flight.

The estate is intimate and its terms are clear, and that is what makes it easy to plan well.

The guest list and the bed list are the same.

Seventy-two guests is the most the restaurant serves and the most the rooms sleep, so nobody leaves at midnight for a hotel in Siena and every guest at dinner is a guest at breakfast. The trade-off is a fixed ceiling of 72, so the list is set early. We plan Dievole as a house party with a wedding in the middle of it, and we recommend three nights rather than two.

Midnight is the hour everywhere on the estate.

The music limit is the same everywhere on the estate, so there is no moving the party inside to buy an hour. We design the evening to peak before twelve, and the open bar and the midnight snack keep it going quietly after the band has packed up.

The wet-weather plan is a marquee.

Plan B at Dievole is a marquee hired for the date. We price it into the budget from the start and hold it on option, so the decision on the morning is only whether it goes up.

The wine shop keeps its own hours.

Dievole’s wine shop stays open for tours and tastings during a buyout, and the estate’s wine club may be on the property. We place the ceremony and the aperitivo in the gardens away from it, and we build a private tasting into the welcome day, which the room rate already includes.

Magic Day plans weddings at Dievole Wine Resort for up to 72 guests, from the first conversation to the final farewell. The resort provides the 32 rooms, the restaurant and its kitchen, the gardens, the pools and the bar, and it requires a planner for every wedding it hosts.

What falls to us is everything around that.

The buyout is chosen for the right number of nights, the two required food and beverage events are designed so they feel like two different evenings, and the symbolic ceremony is set in the gardens with the civil one booked at the comune. The marquee is priced and held on option, the band and the DJ are briefed to the midnight limit, and coaches run from Florence and Siena for arrivals and departures.

We know the road from Florence through the Chianti hills, and that a September date puts the harvest in the photographs. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people are coming, and we will tell you what the weekend comes to.