San Leonardo’s Blog

…here we are at the end of the long harvest of 2008, which lasted a full forty days longer than usual, due partly to the staggered harvesting of the various varieties but above all to the favourable weather, which enabled us to harvest right up into October, just like we used to do in the good old days!

Devatting – the separation of the skins from the wine – signals the definitive end of the harvest and the fermentation process. Even though we have been working hard in this period, there have been moments of intense joy. There are only four or five of us in the cellar, but as we move around from press to press, we certainly do have some great fun! For a week, we have had a student called Marco from the San Michele Agrarian Institute working with us, who has shown great dedication in carrying out even some of the hardest and “dirtiest” jobs – the ones that teach you how to become a real cellarman. Marco has seen first-hand how we work and how we organise ourselves, and he will definitely have been struck by the simplicity and “non-technological” nature of the cellar: the skins are still taken out by hand using forks placed inside the vats (which are all strictly made from concrete), and our presses date from 1949, when Marquis Carlo had not yet turned twenty, so they’ve been through a harvest or two, to say the least!

The 2008 harvest ended on a positive note and proved very satisfactory. The wine is now ready to face the winter…as it awaits the arrival of the spring…

Today I received a wonderful, hugely entertaining book on the dogs that populate the wineries of Italy, which even features our own pooches: Boris, my father’s old Chow Chow, and  Jago and Winnie, the two long-haired German Shepherds that live in our old courtyard. This is a small tribute to these great friends, who are always ready with a “smile” and who give us priceless moments of joy even when the vintage is far from perfect!

Hello, there! My name is Antonio, and I am the cellarman of the Tenuta San Leonardo. This is my tenth year here, and I have to say that the first adjective that comes to mind to describe the 2008 harvest is “calm”!

In fact, in all these years, I have never been so calm during a harvest! The weather was beautiful and the fermentation progressed steadily, never reaching excessively high temperatures, all of which has allowed us to work well both in the cellar and in the vineyards, managing every operation very carefully.

Each day in the cellars, I carry out several pumpovers of the wine fermenting in the vats, checking the temperature and sugar level of the must so that I can stay abreast of the step-by-step progress of the entire fermentation cycle in every single vat. In the cellar we have around thirty vats, all of which are made from concrete – just like those used in the leading French chateaux – because concrete prevents the vats from undergoing rapid shifts in temperature. When the temperatures go beyond the desired level, the vats are either separated, meaning that we remove a part of the wine and place it in a different vat, or we carry out so-called “open” pumpovers, whereby we allow the wine to fall into a keg in order to cool it and oxygenate it. Our cellar is very artisanal in the sense that technology has never made major inroads here – we don’t use any mechanical method or system to refrigerate the must, and the fermentation is not monitored electronically. Everything here is done as it was in the past, although we do use latest-generation pumps to ensure that the wine is “beaten” to the least possible extent.

In short, we are firm believers in the idea that the less you “meddle” with the winemaking process, the better the wine turns out to be, and when we have a vintage like 2008, it really is possible to produce great wines.

For a few days now, we have been busy harvesting the grapes, and I would like to start by giving you a report on what we’re doing so that you can get some idea of how we make our wines here at San Leonardo.

The first variety that we normally harvest on our estate is Merlot. This grape is the first to reach perfect ripeness. In contrast to most other companies, which process their grapes using high-technology equipment and sophisticated laboratory analysis, at San Leonardo we are used to putting our trust in our own experience, so we pick the grapes when we feel that the right time has come.

Merlot is a variety that has to be monitored day by day. In September, when the marked temperature shifts arrive – in this part of Italy, we can be talking about a temperature differential of 16-18 ˚C between night and day – you also get a lot of humidity in the morning, causing dew. The dewdrops that form on the grapes, together with the drops of rainwater (we can get very heavy downpours in this period), cause the Merlot berries to swell up until they burst, leading in turn to mould, which can soon cover the entire bunch. This can have very serious consequences, so the winemaker needs to weigh up the ripeness of the grapes against their state of health before deciding which path to follow.

This year, we got off to a good start: the high sugar level and bright colour of the must indicated that the grapes were in great shape, so the resultant wine is likely to be of a very high quality, but we’ll keep you posted on this as we progress through the various cellar processes. In these images, you can see the harvest in the part of our estate (3 hectares) in which the grapes are trained using the pergola trentina method. On the remainder of the estate, we use the single and double spurred-cordon system.