Brunello di Montalcino

At first there was the Brunello di Montalcino. I found in the best restaurants the Brunello di Montalcino Mastrojanni and consumed often. In 1983 I came to Montalcino for the first time and I bought the Brunello di Montalcino wine in different place. In 1987 I visited Sandro Chia: he also producer of Brunello di Montalcino. And I met Carlo Vittori made into wine, Brunello di Montalcino by Sandro. So I'm in love with Charles Montalcino and began to look for me on a farm with the rights of Brunello di Montalcino to make me as producer of Brunello di Montalcino. It took ten years because we found Podere Le Ripi, 54 hectares of land with only one recorded in the Brunello di Montalcino. Wolf & Sirens was born in 2003, my first Brunello di Montalcino produced at Podere Le Ripi. And in 2008, confining Podere Le Ripi with Mastrojanni, after a long friendship with Andrea Machetti, former producer of Brunello di Montalcino and responsible Mastrojanni, we purchased with the Illy Group SpA (the holding company of us brothers Illy) the Mastrojanni which is now one of the best known brands of Brunello di Montalcino.

Brunello di Montalcino

Today, the Brunello di Montalcino Back of Donkey Mastrojanni often gets 94 points WAS and Parker and Brunello di Montalcino Wolves & Sirens Podere Le Ripi obtained with 2004 Weinwisser of 19,5 / 20, an exceptional result for an exceptional wine as Brunello di Montalcino. This ten-year adventure in Montalcino and in particular with the Brunello di Montalcino was the most beautiful of my life and continues: we are building a new cellar for Brunello di Montalcino, Podere Le Ripi that would become the cathedral of wine, with lots of pulpit to preach to Brunello di Montalcino and refined in our oak barrels. But we are also pursuing the project of Bonsai wine or the vineyard Brunello di Montalcino densest in the world. With 62,500 plants per hectare this Brunello di Montalcino comes from vines with deep roots that produce more than 2 meters per plant on average, a cluster: a new innovation in the world of fine wine that was born right here at Podere Le Ripi, in the town of Montalcino under the specification of Brunello di Montalcino. Today, the Brunello di Montalcino wine, Podere Le Ripi is a very rare because they produce very little and with the concept Bonsai wine become, I hope, the Brunello di Montalcino's most wanted in the world. Francesco Illy Winemaker in Montalcino Producer of Brunello di Montalcino At Podere Le Ripi, Montalcino
 
The Bonsai grows

All my consultants told me I was crazy and that the plants would simply die.

The opposite happened: the mortality of Bonsai stopped at 8%. All the other vineyards had an average of 30%!

We gave every plant a little brace pole of acacia and we grew the vines as small trees, we call it “alberello”: two and a half years later, with their third leaf, they made the first barrique of wine, the Bonsai Sangiovese 2007.

I could not believe it: none of the vineyards I had planted had even shown a grape before the fourth leave! And even when they became grownup and in full production, they never arrived to this quantities.

The Bonsai experiment was a tenth of an hectare and the production was roughly 3.300 kg per hectare from the very beginning! Now, in 2010, this is an average that I still do not reach with the whole 14 hectares of vineyards.

My idea was to have a bunch of some 200 gramms per plant, or roughly 7.700 kg of grapes per hectare. Some plants were dead, some alive but gave no fruits and so the average of 7.000 kg per hectare allowed by the disciplinary of the Brunello di Montalcino was easy to be reached, thing that no other vineyard would produce.

In fact some grapes were carrying more bunches and we had to throw a part of them to the ground a month or so before harvest in order to let the other bunches ripen to perfection.