San Leonardo’s Blog

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.

…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.