What’s next for Italy’s illustrious Brunello wine?
A visit to Tuscany reveals the tussle between history and innovation
A long history and an unparalleled reputation are not necessarily assets for new owners. In 2017, when it became clear that the private French group EPI had acquired Il Greppo, Montalcino’s most revered estate, the close-knit Italian wine establishment held its breath.
Along with Barolo, Brunello di Montalcino is Italy’s most famous wine. Ferruccio Biondi Santi of Il Greppo is seen as its late-19th-century founder. His descendants continued the tradition of making grapes from his carefully selected Sangiovese vines. What would the French group, owner of Piper-Heidsieck and Charles Heidsieck champagnes, do with this Tuscan treasure?
When Giampaolo Bertolini was made CEO of the estate by EPI in 2019, he was fully aware that the spotlight was on him. He has continued to insist that any changes have been minuscule and entirely focused on quality, although the purchase of a new six-hectare vineyard in 2019 (albeit with the same soil type and elevation as Il Greppo) raised eyebrows.
When I visited Il Greppo in June, it was not the vines but the winery that caught my attention. I had just spent the morning at a brand-new Montalcino estate, Giodo, owned by Carlo Ferrini and his daughter Bianca, and I couldn’t help contrasting the ease with which they could operate with the constraints at Il Greppo.
For a start, the Biondi-Santi winery is undeniably cramped. Applications to extend it have been thwarted because it is on the site of a chapel and burial ground. The new team has had to buy a separate building to store the older vintages for which the producer is so famous.
The hand of history is evident everywhere, not least in the corner of the old winery where the desk of Ferruccio’s grandson Franco remains untouched, along with his jacket and deerstalker. Franco, in charge from 1971 until his death in 2012, famously resisted the 1990s fashion for beefing up Brunello with French grapes and more ripeness. He continued to make Brunellos that need years in the bottle and then hours, perhaps days, in the glass to reveal themselves as delicate, exceptionally long-lived expressions of the Tuscan Sangiovese grape.
The winery is basically a back extension of the Biondi Santi family’s 16th-century villa, untouched in case Franco’s 94-year-old widow wants to use it. An ancient, dusty Citroën SM sits in the garage, sinking into the weed-strewn gravel as its tyres deflate.
Compare and contrast that with the Ferrinis’ spanking new, custom-built premises on the Giodo estate east of Sant’Angelo in Colle. (They managed to buy in 2000, just before land prices in the Brunello di Montalcino zone soared.)
The spacious, beautiful and sustainably designed modern winery is carved into the hillside. It is gravity-fed, rather than using mechanised pumps to move the wine around and decorated in indigo, the colours of Florence’s football team Fiorentina. It is surrounded by freshly landscaped gardens designed to attract bees to its local flora. The flat roof, with its views of the nearby countryside, is covered with solidified lava imported from Etna, where the Ferrinis also make wine. (Maybe hauling this from Sicily to Tuscany wasn’t all that sustainable?)
Ferrini is feted as one of Italy’s most famous oenology consultants. During the course of his 45 vintages, he had time to work out the ideal design for a new winery and, as a result, says that winemaking in these premises, ready for the 2020 vintage, is “banalissimo”, meaning extremely straightforward. He has been reducing his consultancy client roster to a mere 30 in order to concentrate on this personal venture.
The Ferrinis make two wines here, Giodo Brunello and La Quinta (their “baby Brunello”), another 100 per cent Sangiovese but from their younger vines. They have six hectares of vines, all of which they planted, whose age currently varies between five and 20 years old. (One of Ferrini’s first jobs, when he was working for the Chianti Classico professional association, was to identify the best clones of Sangiovese.) The Ferrinis are free to make La Quinta as they please because it is sold simply as a Tuscan red, so they age it half in wood and half in the fashionable clay pots that the wine world now rather inaccurately calls amphora. It is delicious.
Production of a wine as historic as Brunello di Montalcino, on the other hand, is tightly circumscribed. The minimum cask-ageing period has successively been reduced but is still quite a long 24 months. I wondered whether this requirement was appropriate for the relatively delicate Sangiovese grape in lighter vintages. “We don’t question it,” Ferrini replied, shrugging. “We have three goals: elegance, elegance and elegance.” Giodo Brunello sells in Italy for about €130, while La Quinta seems to me a relative bargain at not much more than €30.
Biondi-Santi’s straight Brunello Annata (non-Riserva) sells for more than Giodo’s, and the famous Riserva bottlings can cost thousands for old vintages. History is expensive.
Bertolini and his team are engaged on a parcel-by-parcel analysis of the Il Greppo estate, aided by the ubiquitous Chilean terroir expert Pedro Parra, with a view to refining vine-growing and winemaking still further. Like so many wine estates, especially those growing Sangiovese, they are plagued by the vine trunk disease esca and are adopting Marco Simonit’s pruning techniques in an effort to minimise its predations.
This year’s exceptionally wet spring and early summer in Tuscany have exacerbated problems in the vineyard with almost jungle-like growth and inconvenient mud underfoot. Ferrini has adopted the technique of folding new shoots on to wires rather than trimming them, which he claims involves less “trauma” and discourages the vine from growing yet more shoots. Both establishments are suffering from the current shortage of vineyard labour, an especially acute problem in Montalcino, which is far from any big city.
We toured Il Greppo’s vines under umbrellas and saw the vine nursery that the new regime has been developing on what was Franco Biondi Santi’s son Jacopo’s tennis court. Bertolini’s research suggests that the famous clone of Sangiovese isolated by Ferruccio and now known as BBS 11 (Brunello Biondi-Santi from row 11 in the vineyard) is well suited only to certain parcels of the estate’s 33 hectares of vines, of which 26 are old enough to produce wine.
I was given a tasting of wine from six different parcels over the past three vintages, which certainly demonstrated huge differences between them. But the new regime says it has no intention of following the current fashion in Montalcino to release single-vineyard bottlings. It probably would be crazy to do such an anti-Ferruccio thing.