Brunello di Montalcino

How Podere Le Ripi became a wine farm

1. The beginning

A long time ago, in 1984, I fell in love with Montalcino. I am a nature photographer and these views, that - like our poet Ungaretti said - enlighten me of immense, just stole my soul: I had to have a house here!

So in 1987 I begun searching for my Tuscan "mansion" without even thinking I would produce some wine: I was a wine lover but I thought I would be too old to enter this incredibly long learning curve.

Every proposal was too big, or too expensive or not suitable... so it took ten years before my friend Carlo Vittori called me again and told me that he had found a place. And, recalling his words...how right he was!

I arrived from Switzerland (I lived there) after a six hours drive to see this shepherd under a centenary Oak taking his afternoon nap with his sheep bleating and ruminating around him and the big white Maremmano dogs running in circle to keep them at spot. (Two of them, mother and daughter, where so wild that they remained with me: he wasn’t able to load them on his truck when he left. And when I asked him a few months later what to do with those dogs, he candidly told me with his Sardinian accent to shoot them, which I obviously never did.)

So I immediately understood that this was my place. The place of my life. The beauty, the distance from what, living there, we call "civilization", the absolute absence of the horrible architectural slaughter of the last century that has destroyed so many Italian landscapes, the perfumes that pervade all year long this hills, the deep view on the east to Monticchiello... and Montepulciano, the prehistoric volcano Monte Amiata on the south, the near amphitheatric hills protecting Le Ripi on the west and north... all this was so wonderful...

But also so uncontaminated. Thousands of years of almost no population, a poor and dry soil that gives very poor crops, over 40°C in the summer and frozen lakes in winter, three or four hundered years old olive trees, forests of incredibly many different trees and shrubs, and flowers, flowers, flowers everywhere, all year around. And the wild asparagus, the Porcini, the blackberry, the white and black truffles that only the dog of my friend Francescos is able to unearth, the wonderful red "corbezzolo" (arbutus). And then the wildlife, with rabbits and deers, boars and porcupines, wolves and yews, badgers and foxes, eagles from the Amiata and herons, buzzards, hawks, and the storks that pass by at the Orcia river twice a year, or al kinds of ducks that come into my lakes.

2. The planting

So, in 1998, I started to rebuild the house and to prepare the fields for the vineyards. I was so touched by the beauty of these soil and its flowers, that I decided not to loose them like others do, by moving all the soil with Caterpillars: I chose the ripper. Two 2 1/2 foot (70cm) long rippers that move the soil without turning it upside down. The video "Respect for the Soil" shows how we did it.



This allowed us to keep the integrity of the flora which I cannot say if it makes my wines better, but certainly gives a look to my vineyards that I love: they kept the shape they had with curves and slopes that you do not see in other vineyards.

When we begun planting, we started with Sangiovese in 2000 with a density of 5.000 roots per hectare (2.000 per acre). But in 2002 I asked myself if a higher density would not make less bunches of grapes per plant and, therefore, more quality. So I reduced the distance between the rows from 2,5 to 2 meters and reached a density of 6.666 plants per hectare (2,700 per acre). But then, in 2003, I decided to go even denser: five rows at 1 meter and one at two meters to allow the tractor to go through: 11.111 p/H or 4,500 p/acre.

And in 2005 I decided to test the densest possible setting of the plants at 1,3 feet (40cm) one from the other: 62.500 p/H, or 25,300 p/acre. The densest vineyard in the world.

I chose to plant it in squares of 4 x 4 meter with 121 plants per square and let my agronomists and my oenologist yelling at me for how stupid I was.

It’s just a tenth of a hectare, I said, let me try if I am really so dumb.

My thought was: if in Burgundy they say that the good wines do not come before the vineyard is at least 35 years old and we know that the root there go very, very deep, this means that quality has a strong relationship with the way that roots go through different layers of geology, absorbing different kinds of minerals. If I oblige the plants to go deep with such a dense planting, maybe I will get a better wine.

Ok, you will be able to taste it from the vintage 2007, which is already in the bottle and will come to market in 2012. And you will realize the difference. The wines are more subtle and elegant, but the aroma spectrum is much more complex and silken.

In the meanwhile look at the video My Bonsai !

3. And the adventure of making my wine

It’s been like a fantastic vortex: beginning with the idea of a house in the middle of untouched beauty, thinking I’ll never become a winemaker, falling in love with these plants of grapes that grow so wonderfully… and at the end harvesting them and making my own wine.

A dream that lasted for 15 years between dreaming and doing, doing and dreaming. As I always say: 'The most beautiful adventure of my life.' Which is still going on.

Because I’m still dreaming, still inventing what could give a better wine, still waiting to see how some dreams of many years will become true, like my non concrete and not armed cellar, like the Bonsai I planted last year. And I still have this fear that something could go wrong. I still have this tension of avoiding any possible error.

So, in 2003, in such a hot and dry year, I decided to do my first wine.

We begun by sorting grape per grape by hand: the year was so hot and the vines so young that every bunch of grapes was dry on the sunny side and mature on the inner part. Discarding all the overripe and dry berries gave us a rich and fully bodied Brunello, fermented by his own yeast. I had a new 20 hectolitres Vosges Oak conical vat to start with: fermentation in new Oak had to become one of the basic characteristics of my wines.

And don’t even think we made no wine with the discarded super dry gapes: they became an incredible sweet wine, with 260 grams residual sugar per litre, from the dry grapes. It is still in the cellar and once in a while we drink a bit of it: it knocks out even black chocolate!

Since then every year I try to repeat it: but I never reached such a sugar concentration again. Who knows? Maybe one day…

I will never forget 2009: this sweet wine was fermenting since a month or so. Then someone in the cellar decided that it was done and gave it a rubber plug. A few days later I tear this plug to taste the wine… and a geyser of wine starts to the roof! I could have tried to plug it again, but I was so shocked that I wasn’t able to do anything than watch my sweet wine leaving this barrique… to be lost.

I called this wine "fuori legge" (outlaw) because it seemed that our disciplinary in Montalcino would prohibit this kind of sweet wine. But I was wrong: we can make a sweet wine called "Occhio di Pernice" (partrige’s eye) and when it will be ready, maybe after seven to ten years of keg (small barrel of 30 to 70 litres), I will bottle it and propose it to the market.

4. Research with the University of Florence

Making wine is an enchanting experience of tradition and innovation.

On one side you have to understand what really works of the old fashioned way of making wine, like the use of wood during fermentation that has been substituted by concrete or stainless steel tanks. Or my love for what we call "legno grande" – which means refining the wines for as long as 34 months in 16 to 40 hectolitres wooden vats or casks.

On the other side you have to try new techniques and understand precisely what makes your wines better.

So I started a research with Professors Alessandro Parenti and Luca Calamai of the Unversity of Florence. Parenti is specialized in engeneering and Calamai in analysis with Mass Spectrometers.

We built a cooling tower to cool the CO2 that wine fermenting develops, and we recovered a liquid, in the average quantity of 1 cc per litre or one to thousand, that has an incredible concentration of aromas that normally are lost in the air. We collected them and analysed them and after four years, in 2010, we decided to give this liquid back to the same wine it had produced it, with a very good result. You can see the procedure in the video "Glass Fermentation Vat", another innovation that we did in order to understand what happens during fermentation in the wine.

This glas vat brought us to study the difference between pushing the cap gently with a baton (we call it "follatura") and the so called "rimontaggio", which consists in pumping liquid wine from the bottom of the vat to the cap in order to keep it wet.

This study presented such a clear amelioration with the "follatura" that we decided to change all our wooden vats with a new model that permits to keep the vat open during fermentation and close it for the refinement period that follows. You can see how this new vats are made in the video "A Vat is Born". Now we are beginning a new study with Professor Paolo Spugnoli from the University of Florence: Spugnoli is a long time Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) specialist and he will analyse our environmental impact at Podere Le Ripi and Mastrojanni in order to understand our CO2 emissions balance as well as the other possible impacts. The purpose of this study is to understand all the possible improvement areas in which we can implement ameliorations in order to reduce our environmental impact, which, by the way, should be already positive. Podere Le Ripi and Mastrojanni together are some 140 hectares (350 acres) of which roughly 90 hectares are forest. As forests absorb in average some 4 tons of CO2 per year, we should be already very positive in the carbon emission calculation with some 360 tons absorbed every year from our woodland. But the study will give us precise information that we will publish in this website.