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.

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