San Leonardo’s Blog

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.

We are approaching the crucial period of the harvest. Here at the winery, all is going well, and after a good summer, the grapes are really coming into their own. Although it’s too early to reach any solid conclusions, the vintage seems rather similar to those of previous years in which there were rainy spring seasons and warm summers, without excessive heat. We have not had to irrigate any of the vineyards, with the exception of a few recently planted plots, and the initial results appear very positive, but as the saying goes, you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch.

We are making the final adjustments to our vineyards, and given that the sun is no longer beating down as intensely as it has been, we are starting to remove the leaves. Naturally, only the leaves on the side of the vineyard that is exposed to the morning sun are removed, whereas the leaves on the south/south-western-facing side are left in place to protect the grapes from the heat of the afternoon sunshine.

This operation is very important in terms of the health of the grapes – it is essential that the morning dew dries out rapidly, thereby avoiding any worries about humidity, since dampness provides the ideal conditions for the development of diseases.

By this stage, there’s nothing left to do but cross our fingers and hope for a good September, with marked temperature shifts between night and day. Indeed, it is thanks to these temperature shifts that San Leonardo’s wines come to be imbued with such elegance. God willing, we will be able to harvest the Merlot grapes towards the end of the month, and then we should have until mid/late October to harvest the Sauvignon grapes, just like we used to do…oh well, we’ll keep you updated on how things progress.