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 Burgundi Lesson
"A vineyard makes a good wine after 35 years." told me all the winegrowers in Burgundy.

I had a Chambolle Musigny a few days ago from Comte de Vogüé and it had written on something like: "This wine has been degraded to Premier Cru because it comes from the young vines of our Musigny parcel."

Hey, I made my first wine that I was already 50, can I wait another 30 years? The answer is NO.

So I begun “rationalizing” the structure of Burgundy: layers of alluvial soil that go as deep as twenty meters and look, it seems that the best “crus”,  the Grand Cru, are exactly where this layers are deeper. A very loose soil, a very draining soil, where the roots can go deeper and deeper, as they want.

All this was telling me that a great wine has to come from plants that feed themselves with many different minerals because their roots go through many different geological layers. That’s it.

But in Burgundy, even with such a dense planting of 10.000 plants per hectare, it takes 35 years.

I do not know how much fertilizer they give in Burgundy, but it seems obvious that the less the plant has to “look for food” the more slowly she will go down.