Gettin' Geeky With It!

So this edition could be considered to be a little bit geeky but our dear gentle readers [that’s you lot by the way] will remember our last newsletter. There we were, in the immortal lyrics of Smile by Lily Allen, having “a little whine and a moan” about winter. We were, however, also looking forward to things getting busier.

[Editors Note: Now I see why he remembered this line although he spells it without the ‘h”….].

Well, consider this our official announcement: Spring has arrived, things are stirring, to-do-lists are being debated – which means they are also being read. The evenings are longer and the buds are out….

[Is this evidence of a budding photographer?]

We are about to get on the roller coaster that is the season, starting this week with Vinitaly in beautiful Verona. We will report on this – we know you can hardly wait!

But for now, let us rewind a little to our annual blending session which is one of the most enjoyable and also stressful tasks in our winemaking year. This is where we finalize the blends for our next year’s vintages. For this we trek north to Empoli for a tasting and blending session with our enologist Emiliano Falsini. Emiliano prefers that we do this in his laboratory so he can stay focused. He doesn’t want any distractions in terms of noise, colors or smells. And when you see him at work, you begin to understand why.

We start the process by taking samples from each wooden barrel (our 20 ha French oak botte and our 500lt tonneaux and 225lt barrique – both of which are of mixed parentage) to make sure all is as it should be. This is where, for example, we might discover that one of our barrels is getting old and needs to be moved on to make furniture, or whiskey (that is whiskey with an “e”) or furniture that you sit on while you drink whiskey.

We start at the top, which is typically our Riserva, assuming of course that we are making a riserva from that year’s harvest. Our Riserva is based on the grapes from our 80 year old vineyard (the fruit flavor and tannins are amazing!). We may however, want to include a touch of Sangiovese from younger vines to add freshness (we are talking 1 to 2%). We also want to decide which Cab Franc or Cab Sauvignon to use and which tonneaux will go best with the Riserva. This year we have decided to make a 100% Cab Franc because the quality of the Cab Franc grapes from the 2024 vintage was just amazing. But we also have to decide which of the barrels we will use for this and which we will keep for blending. Confused yet? And you don’t have Emiliano staring at you as you realise he just asked you a technical question in Italian. Holy Camolie Robin!!

This exercise is more of an art than a science. Emiliano works the room. He stops mid sentence and asks (rhetorically): “this is from Botte 7 / Barrique 22 / etc?” And he is never wrong. And when you consider that we are one of the perhaps 30 vineyards that he works with (many of whom are substantially bigger than we are), you begin to realise why he wants no sensory distractions and what an amazing enologist he is.

For each wine we end up with two or three choices based on the views of our little committee of 5. Then, Paari and I have to decide which ones to proceed with and what the final blends will be. This is not intimidating at all! OK, there may be an element of heart in mouth but at the end of the day Emiliano is helping us to make the wine we want to make, we rely on him for his expertise but the final taste profile is, and must be, ours.

And remember, our wines age for different periods so we are jumping around from year to year. As we do it, we remember what each vendemmia was like, what the growing conditions were like, what near disaster was avoided, what friends or guests were press ganged into working in the vines:

2022 - easier than 2021 (it didn’t seem like that at the time);

2023 - a disaster, we lost 85% of our harvest due to Peronospera (nobody misses 2023);

2024 – redemption arc (amazing Cab Franc).

We then “had to” taste the Cabernet just to verify that our memories were correct before moving on to the Oriolo and the Rosso, etc. This is professionalism people.

At the end of the morning we are left with a surplus of wine. We could bottle up to 30,000 bottles from our current stock but we have chosen to bottle only 18,000 and to sell the rest as sfuso. Some of these decisions can be hard. For example, we have a lot of excess Merlot and Emiliano thinks that the quality of our Merlot is excellent and is encouraging us to bottle more. Our perspective is that for such a small winery we can’t produce too big a range as, in the end of the day, we need to sell the wine.

Hopefully, you can see test tube glasses, bottles, and focus.

And here is the list of what we finished:

Riserva 2022 - 2000 bottles

Vino Nobile 2023 - 6000 bottles

Rosso 2024 - 6000 bottles

Super Tuscan Oriolo 2024 - 2000 bottles

SuperTuscan 100% Cabernet Franc 2024 - 2000 bottles

Finally, our five hour session ends and this being Italy, we all retreated across the road for lunch. It’s the only time we have been at lunch with Italians where we all refused the waiter’s suggestion for wine, shouting in harmony – NO GRAZIE!

If you made it this far, congratulations—you’re officially one of us now. Geeky, slightly obsessive, and probably overdue a glass of something good.

Toodles,

Niall & Paari