San Leonardo’s Blog

Spring has now sprung even in the South Tyrol, and with the reawakening of the soil we’re getting ready to carry out the various maintenance tasks and improvement works – on the vineyards, the parkland and the vegetable garden – that form the routine for the San Leonardo staff during April and May each year.

As I’ve mentioned before, we had a great deal to do this winter to implement a new pruning system (the system devised by Simonit and Sirch, to be precise), which we wanted to roll out across all of the vineyards on our estate.

Patently, there are major differences between Guyot training, (simple or dual) spurred-cordon training and the so-called pergola trentina, but we have tried to adapt the new pruning technique to all of the training systems we use, with a view not only to endowing the vineyards with a longer life but also to achieving more standardised production and, above all, a more uniform maturation of the bunches – a factor that will be very important later on, during the fermentation and ageing of the wines.

We levelled off a 30-year-old vineyard that had become heavily infested with esca disease – the scourge that is destroying large numbers of Europe’s oldest vineyards – and then ploughed the plot in autumn. Here you can see it tilled and ready to be re-planted.

This winter, we had a lot of snow, which is a great thing for us farmers – indeed, we are wont to say, “hunger above the snow, bread below the snow”. This old saying, like all proverbs, actually encapsulates a grain of truth, because snow disinfects the soil, keeping it damp and preventing it from turning to ice deeper down. The truth of this proverb has become clear in spring, because the vineyards are more homogenous, and even the flowers are more opulent and uniform. Moreover, when spring comes a little late (as it has done this year), we can avoid the worries associated with the frost that can sometimes appear out of the blue in April.

I took a number of shots a few days ago of some dandelions, the yellow flowers that invade the vineyards – an invasion that to us signals the end of the long South Tyrolean winter and the revitalisation of the fields.

In upcoming posts, we’ll show you the development of the vineyards and the whole estate, and we’ll also look at the planting pattern that we have used for the new plot.

Those who know something about the old rural pruners will be aware that they followed an ancient ritual, which involved stopping in front of every vine, inspecting it carefully, initiating a silent dialogue with it and then intervening to meet its specific needs. Sadly, those master pruners are no more! The vineyards were mechanised to compensate for the lack of manpower. For many years, much of the work in the fields has been done by labourers from other countries – these people are ready and willing to work hard, but often have no experience in dealing with vines and do not speak the language that the pruners know so well. 

Pruning has become invasive, inflicting wounds on the vines that cannot be fully healed, thereby exposing them to trunk diseases. It was against this backdrop that Marco and Pierpaolo launched their laudable project. What was required was to apply the same criteria used for preventive medicine: ageing well affords a better quality of life and also allows enormous social savings to be made (in terms of treatment, medicine and hospitalisation costs). They understood that if the vine is to survive over the long term, it is crucial to intervene when it is still in its “infancy”. At all of the companies they work with in Italy, they run training courses on their pruning method, thus helping to re-evaluate and give dignity back to an ancient art. It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of the vine in the vineyard – and even the ultimate quality of the wine – depends on the skill of the pruner. 

Marco and Pierpaolo were responsible for conceiving and setting up the first courses on pruning in Italy. The first of these was held at the San Felice winery in Castelnuovo Berardenga, in the heart of the Chianti Classico zone. The second has just come to an end at the Faculty of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo.

In short, Marco and Pierpaolo have leveraged the wisdom of the past and applied it to the present. Over time, a misguided approach to pruning can limit sap flow and undermine the effectiveness of the work being done, leading to irreparable damage – the quality of the untreated grape is compromised and the vine itself dies when still relatively young. This, in turn, increases the management costs. That’s why their approach is geared squarely towards preventing the onset of disease.

In search of eternal youth. 

Marco Simonit and Pierpaolo Sirch – together with their 8-strong team – have perfected a method of pruning that is geared towards making sure that the vines reach a ripe old age, which entails keeping them healthy for at least fifty years. Their method – which involves pruning the young parts of the trunk – affords myriad advantages: 

- first and foremost, it prevents the onset of the trunk diseases that, like a pandemic, are laying waste to vineyards

- it marks the return of an approach to vineyard management that had been partially abandoned and that ascribes high value to older vines, as encapsulated by the ancient rural proverb “la vite vecchia fa buon vino” (“the old vine makes good wine”); we would like to add that it can also help the viticulture of the future

- it can reduce the management costs by an average of 30% (and even up to 50% in relation to certain aspects)

- it helps to keep alive the art of the pruner, whose skills are at risk of being lost.

Simonit & Sirch has recently undertaken an initiative of immense importance, which will see the company collaborate with two of Italy’s leading universities in order to analyse the effects of its method on the vines, both in physiological and pathological terms. Two internationally renowned professors have made their way to Corno di Rosazzo, where Simonit & Sirch is based: Professor Laura Mugnai, lecturer on the vine pathology course at the University of Florence (part of the degree course on viticulture and oenology) and, since 2002, president and founder member of the International Council of Grape Wine Trunk Diseases, which benefits from the input of researchers from 22 wine-producing countries; and Professor Attilio Scienza, lecturer in viticulture and oenology at the University of Milan. Together with Marco Simonit and Pierpaolo Sirch, the professors will conduct a long-term research project – the first and currently the only one of its kind in Italy – on vineyards located in five of the most important wine-growing regions of Italy: Friuli Venezia Giulia, Franciacorta, Piedmont, Tuscany and Sicily. Laura Mugnai will deal with the pathological aspects, whereas Attilio Scienza will focus on the physiological side. The work of the two Friulian agronomists will provide growers with concrete responses to a problem that is having dramatic consequences: the spread of vine diseases such as esca disease and eutypiosis. 

The Friuli region has played a crucial role in the re-birth of Italian winemaking, which began in earnest at the end of the 1960s. It was here that vine nurseries first came into being (25% of the world’s rooted cuttings are Friulian), and now Simonit & Sirch are bestowing the secret of eternal youth on our future vineyards.

Today sees the start of an important new chapter in the history of the vineyards of the San Leonardo estate, because the lessons in pruning from “grape preparation experts Marco Simonit and Pierpaolo Sirch”, masters of the pruning and restoration of old vineyards, begin this very day. 

It should be stressed that it is not as if, up until now, we have been unable to manage our vineyards; rather, the fact is that over recent years we have realised that our vineyards have, alas, been assailed by esca disease, the scourge that is slowly but surely decimating the more “elderly” vines – i.e. those with the greatest experience, so to speak, which are of course those that contribute decisively to imbuing our wines with such character and texture.

As soon as we became aware – ten years ago now – of the onset of this terrible disease, we started to look around for a solution, which we had hoped would come via our French nursery experts. After various attempts, which produced little in the way of tangible results, we returned to Italy – to the Friuli region, to be precise – where we met Marco and Pierpaolo through Professor Attilio Scienza, the great exponent of Italy’s winemaking culture.

Their approach to vineyard management fascinated us, and so we immediately visited some of the vineyards that have been managed over the past decade using their technique. There, we found many responses to the questions we had been asking ourselves.

After a couple of visits to our estate and a discussion with the people who take care of our vineyards,

Here’s Marco Simonit together with our team, after having dissected a number of diseased vines.

we decided to open this new chapter, and so, from today onwards, we are starting the theory and practice lessons in the vineyard, and we hope that, within three years, we will have succeeded in stemming the tide of this scourge by making the vines more robust. The implementation of this new method of pruning is aimed not only at ensuring the longevity of the vineyard but also at guaranteeing that it produces grapes more effectively.

But this is not all that’s new: we thought that you, too, would be interested in what’s going on in our vineyards, so we have asked the two pruning instructors to tell you – in their own words – about the extraordinary restoration project we are undertaking together. As such, we will be opening a new section of this blog to let our two friends have their say.

We very much hope that these posts, dedicated exclusively to the progress being made in the vineyard, will be of interest to you. We are convinced that, if you stay up to date on our activities through this blog, you will want to savour the perfumes of the soil and the seasons, as well, of course, as some great wine.

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.