2014 Vintage
SUMMARY
We have excellent vines that seem willing to bend to our human desires, to share our wishes, and to be partners in our goals.
Despite a notably rainy and cold summer we have found ourselves with splendid grapes. This is the result of a lot of hard work and also the fortunate location of our incredible valley which opens out to the sea.
September and October were mostly clear, allowing us beautiful cool night harvests. The wines this year are somewhat brooding and deep; like reticent travellers after a long and difficult journey, their character’s enriched and defined by their experience.
The essence of the territory, with its spicy Mediterranean notes, will be the distinctive trait of every sip.
Our 2014 wines are dense and concentrated though lower in alcohol. They are sons of the light, born without the warmth of the day.(This is a difficult metaphor to understand and I would consider taking it out or explaining it further)The wines have a medium intense colour with an aromatic profile and tannins that are ripe and glossy.
SEASON
2013 autumn and winter had temperatures higher than the average – never dipping below 0ËšC – while heavy downpours completely saturated the ground.
Budbreak occurred at the end of March.
May and June, on the other hand, brought much less rain than usual, with mild temperatures that encouraged normal vine growth, marked by a perfectly consistent, rapid flowering that took place the last week of June.
Most of July continued with mild conditions and a long veraison.
Intense cloudbursts during the last week of July and the first week of August brought amounts of rain that meant the vines continued their vegetative growth when they should have been putting their energy into ripening their clusters.
August then stayed unexpectedly cool, slowing ripening still further, and forced us to carry out extensive leaf-pulling to better expose the fruit to the rays of the sun and thus encourage their ripening.
August made us realize that the 2014 harvest would be a late one. The berries, swollen because of the rains, exhibited unsuitably-low levels of polyphenols, and thus stood in need of a longer ripening period to give them as much accumulation and concentration of pigments and tannins as possible.
The cool and unusually rainy August was in fact quite favourable to the white grapes, which were able to ripen slowly, with no excessive heat spells or dry periods. The wines are particularly well structured, with multi-layered aromatics, and a finely-calibrated balance between ripeness and crispness.
We decided to suspend operations and wait while we continued to thin-out leaf coverage and cull the least ripe clusters in order to direct the vine’s energies to the most promising fruit.
The second half of September ushered in days that were mild and full of sun, with significant day to night-time temperature differentials. These would be the perfect conditions for completing the ripening process, and so we swung into full harvest.
We started with the Trebbiano, Vermentino and Malvasia grapes for the Luminoso on September 19th, 2014 then the Syrah of Quercia on September 18-19th.
The fine weather held right up to early October, when ten days of dry northerly winds allowed us to let the Sangiovese from the Carandelle vineyard harvested enjoy the long days of sunlight in order to pack into the fruit the greatest quality possible, to be harvested starting on the 30th of September, 2014 . The last clusters of Sangiovese from Carandelle, Selceto and Sugarelle vineyards finally entered the cellar on October 2nd.
The Petit Verdot grapes from the Morello vineyard and from Campo Novo vineyard were the last coming off the vines on October 10th, 2014.
