The Vines and the Cellar

My grandfather Ezio cared deeply about the quality of his wines, and it has become a family tradition to make our own grapes in to wine. With my nephew Andrea, I have looked after the cellar for over twenty-five years, yet until a few years ago we sold our wine unbottled; it was only in the early Nineties that we decided to adopt new agronomical and enological techniques which would allow us to reach the end of the productive cycle, bottling our own wine within a few years.

This meant huge investments in the vineyards (new planting systems with selected clones, and renewal of the older systems) and in the cellar (purchase of state-of-the-art enological equipment), an assessment of the effective quality potential (thanks to enologist Giorgio Marone and vineyard manager Folco Giovanni Bencini), adaptation of our productive mentality towards higher quality (short pruning, thinning bunches, etc.).

But at the end of that decade all this work enabled us at last to produce wines for bottling which conformed to our ideals and which we consider worthy of our name. I personally supervise the severe winter pruning, thinning of bunches in summer, selection of grapes first in the vineyard and later in the cellar (cellar man Andrea Mammuccini), and the work and training of our assistants.

We are delighted to have tasted the wine we wanted to make from the very beginning, with the 1998 vintage; but we are also aware that we still have a long way to go and this is why every harvest is a moment for reflection, the culmination of a year’s labour, but also a point of departure towards higher objectives.