Brunello di Montalcino

The refining can last over three years. The French often attack other wine producing countries with their famous say: "Nous faisons de l’affinage, vous faites du stockage." meaning that they rifine wines and we just stock it. Maybe someone does it, not us.

But they are right in saying that this is a particularly delicate phase of the wine making: all the barrels has to be tastes more almost once a week and many analysis accompany this procedure. The wines go into some reduced phases and present a strange rotten eggs smell: here attention must be paid because this smell has to be contained. Sometimes it’s the wine itself that changes and sometimes you have to bring some oxygen to it, simply moving the wine from a barrel to another.

Colour in Aging Wines

Big barrels or barrique? The always repeated question has a very clear answer: these are two completely different aging ways. The barrique ages the wines in an oxidative ambience and the big barrels in a reductive ambience: why?

First: the surface of the container in relationship to the content reduces drastically as the container becomes bigger. A liter of wine will have roughly 80 square centimeters of surface in a barrique and about 30 in a 35 hectoliters vat.

Second: the thickness of the stave is much smaller the smaller the container is.



Therefore the quantity of oxygen that can reach the wine depends first on the speed of penetration that is faster if the stave is thinner, and then from the surface that brings the oxygen to the wine.

Some where there is a dimension where the quantity of oxygen needed by the aging wine is higher than the quantity that the barrel lets in: this is the moment in which the ambience stops to be oxidative and becomes reductive.

What happens is that the colour molecules called Anthiocyanins contained in the wine turn brownish and reddish if they stay in a reductive ambience as they keep their original blue if the ambience is oxidative: this is something many people do not know.

Now, as an old and oxidized wine tends to become brownish and to loose colour, man people think that such a colour in a wine is a sign of over aging: this is particularly untrue with the Brunello di Montalcino, if you only think that his name, Brunello, means “brownie” because the wine, historically, was made in big barrels and was constantly, for years and years, in a reductive ambience.

It is obviously possible to make a “blue” Brunello: those who make systematic use of barriques produce wines with this colour, which means that it is not the Sangiovese that becomes brown with aging but just the way it is aged, exactly as in Barolo.

I can remember the anger of Mauro Mascarello when the journalists where criticizing his Barolo Monprivato for his “unghia aranciata” (orange nail) in the early nineties! They did not know this particular phenomenon… and they still do not know it yet.

Bottling

First we have to define the mass of the wine we will bottle.

The wine will come from different barrels and we will taste them all one by one. Then we will begin to put the samples together and taste it again. For the Brunello di Monalcino it is easier because the wine that will compose the mass is already defined from the very beginning, from the harvest.

But for the other wines – like our Canna Torta that contains vintage per vintage different vineyards of Sangiovese and different quantities of Merlot and Syrah – this process can take a few hours.

Some other wines, like the Bonsai that is a very small quantity, are just blended together and if they convince us… the mass is defined.

After we have decided the masses we put the wines together and wait for a few weeks.

Then we bottle it. The smaller amount by hand and the bigger, once in a year, with a bottlicng machine that my friend Maurizio Anselmi brings with his trucks. This machine washes the bottles with wine first and then fills them with a neutral gas, Argon, in order to fill the bottle with no air.

Soon I will be able to show also a video about bottling.