TUSCAN TREASURES

By Rod Smith

Photography by Colleen Duffley

Region unveils the shining heart of Italian wine.

Renaissance astronomer Galileo Galilei got in a lot of trouble when he asserted that the earth revolved around the sun. But nobody disagreed at all when he ventured to suggest that “wine is composed of sunlight and wit.”

As a specific reference to the wines of his native Tuscany, it might as well be literally true. Grapes, after all, are merely the medium through which people turn sunshine and water into something that engages the senses and the intellect.

Lately, the Tuscan ratio has favored sunshine over wit by a fair margin. A series of warm, dry growing seasons has given us a wealth of gorgeous Italian wine, especially the classic table wines made from the Sangiovese grape in the Tuscan enclaves of Chianti Classico, Montalcino, and Montepulciano.

Tuscany  is the shining heart of Italian wine. Certainly, Italy has many excellent wine regions. The entire country is virtually one big vineyard, and each region has its own bottled personality. True, a few areas are more closely examined by connoisseurs than Tuscany. Piemonte, for example, produces the great Barolos that by most accounts rank first among Italian reds for complexity and long aging. Yet no region can match the sunny, easy-drinking wines of Tuscany for sheer crowd appeal.

Not coincidentally, given their popularity in the United States, Tuscan reds are among the most California-like of all European wines. Like California’s coastal valleys, the climate of the mountainous wine country just inland from the Maremma coast is warm and dry, but the heat is tempered by the sea. The mélange of marine and volcanic soils also resembles that of California.

The similarity rang loud and clear last spring during the annual presentation of the newest and most recent Tuscan vintages. As I tasted dozens of Chianti Classico, Nobile di Montepulciano, and Brunello di Montalcino wines from the last five vintages,  I couldn’t help thinking that global warming may not be all bad from a viticultural perspective. Warm vintages make winemakers look good. Not that Tuscan winemakers aren’t capable of the sort of clever winemaking that pulls good wines from a bad vintage like so many rabbits out of a hat. But in the past few vintages, any sleight of hand would have been superfluous.

The flood of red treasure from Tuscany is at its peak now. There are still a lot of luscious 1997 Chianti Classicos around. If you see one on a wine list, order it — although now the ’97s are being succeeded by the somewhat more angular but no less delicious ’98s. Montepulciano is offering toothsome, chewy ’98 Nobiles and slurpable ’99 Rossos. And, in addition to Montalcino’s exuberant ’99 Rossos, it is offering unusually approachable ’96 Brunellos — wines to drink while we wait for the majestic ’95s to soften up.

REVOLUTIONARY TIMES
Tuscany  is one of the oldest wine regions in the world, going back to pre-Imperial times, perhaps to the Etruscans. And yet Tuscan wine has been evolving more quickly than ever during the past few years, to the point where tasting recent vintages in Tuscany is like looking at single frames from an action film.

Of course, revolution has been the stuff of Tuscan history since the beginning. But never in the struggles between Florence and Siena, the Medicis and the Albizzis, has there been a revolution like the improvement of Tuscan wines during the last decade. It has left everyone happy. Indeed, the only blood to flow is that of an ancient Roman god; Sangiovese means “the blood of Jove.”

Sangiovese is a wonderful wine grape. It has a great capacity for expressing site, which makes tasting wines from different estates a fascinating and scrumptious exercise. In its sensitivity to location, and its range of red and black fruit flavors, it is more like Pinot Noir than the more austere and herbaceous-tasting grapes of the Cabernet family, including Merlot.

However, centuries of cultivation have produced dozens if not hundreds of variants of the Sangiovese vine, many yielding unremarkable wine and thus pulling down Chianti’s general quality. Hence, the revolution. During the 1980s, the concept of re-focusing the Chianti vineyard gained currency. That led to the Chianti Classico 2000 campaign, whereby the Chianti Classico wine community took a long, hard look at its raw material.

The idea behind the Chianti 2000 project was to sort out and evaluate prevalent clones of Sangiovese and other primary grape varieties, and to figure out which ones gave the most concentrated, structured, complex wines expressing the variety’s unique perfume and flavor (to me, the signal notes are dried roses and sour cherries). After some 10 years of microvinification, analysis, and tasting, they narrowed the field down to 18 clones of Sangiovese, and numerous clones of the blending varieties Canaiolo, Mammolo, and Colorino.

Vineyards newly planted or converted to the favored clones have begun to bear fruit in ideal circumstances. The last five vintages have all been hotter than usual, and the wines show it in various ways. The best producers have used the extra heft to their advantage, offering wines that are remarkable for their combined power and elegance.

As for the worst, there don’t seem to be any. In tasting scores of wines over a week, I encountered few wines that were downright awful. The technical standards are high; most of my complaints had to do with too much oak and the creeping menace of internationally generic varieties such as Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, both of which are allowed within the category of “other grapes” in the blend (up to 20 percent). Among the outstanding ’98 Chianti Classicos were those from Castello di Verrazzano, Fonterutoli, Castello di Volpaia, Badia a Coltibuono, Castello di Meleto, Carobbio, and Le Cinciole.

WINE DISTRICTS
Similar revolutionary campaigns have been waged in the other important Tuscan enclaves. As every good wine maven knows, the red wine from the smaller Montalcino district just south of Chianti is made from the grape called Brunello, while the wine from even smaller Montepulciano is made from Prugnolo Gentile. Often, however, not even the most assiduously boring wine snob is aware that Brunello and Prugnolo Gentile are actually local variants of Sangiovese. Both have been upgraded by efforts similar to Chianti 2000.

The Brunello district, surrounding the hill town of Montalcino south of Siena, is even more like California than the much larger Chianti region to the north. Montalcino is warmer and drier, and the offshoot of Sangiovese that has evolved there makes the most of those conditions to yield wines that are typically more profound and long-lived than the more exuberant, earlier-maturing Chiantis.

The climate owes much to a high-pressure cell that persists throughout the summer in the region of Mount Amiata, the region’s tallest peak. The wooded slopes of Mount Amiata provide much of the world’s meager supply of white truffles, along with the Tuscan cook’s beloved wild boar. They are honeycombed with the temples and tombs of ancient Etruscans, who cultivated wine grapes in the region thousands of years ago.

Sangiovese has only been grown seriously in the Montalcino district for 150 years or so, the blink of an eye in the arc of wine’s history. Brunello di Montalcino only came to the greater wine world’s attention in 1969, when a 1955 Biondi-Santi Brunello was served to Queen Elizabeth in Rome.

Not long after that, some of the region’s more progressive producers concluded that the Brunello vineyards could be greatly improved by clonal selection. For about two decades, they have been intensively evaluating and selecting individual clones to upgrade their vineyards. The fruits of that campaign are just beginning to show up in neoclassical Brunello di Montalcino wines, which reflect the process in new dimensions of body, aroma, and flavor.

The Brunello camp has been attacking the upgrade challenge with a slightly different manifesto. In Chianti, the goal has been to get more concentration, body, and depth out of the grape, buffing it out to produce more muscular, substantial wines.

The Brunellists already have plenty of substance, to the point where a typical Brunello di Montalcino of the past required a few years in bottle just to become approachable. Thus, they have been encouraging their grape’s kinder, gentler qualities. They’re looking for softer tannins, heightened aromas, and an ever-greater richness of the Sangiovese’s celebrated spectrum of dark, earthy flavors — working from tannin toward juiciness, perhaps even balancing Brunello’s power with some of that succulent cherry-candy character more typical of Chianti.

The charge has been led by the Banfi estate, a sprawling domain of vineyards and olive groves surrounding the medieval Castello Banfi just south of Montalcino. Banfi produces a wide range of wines, including so-called Supertuscans, which are blends of Sangiovese and international varieties (at Banfi, Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah). But the soul of the estate is its Brunello di Montalcino, and its owners, the American wine importers John and Harry Mariani, have spared no expense in attempting to produce the finest possible Brunello.

That has happened literally from the ground up. Under the direction of Enzio Rivella, one of Italy’s most respected wine men, Banfi has conducted a long-range program of selection and assessment in its vineyards, gradually condensing more than 180 selections into around half a dozen of the most desirable clones. The chosen few have been used to replant vineyards throughout the vast Banfi property.

It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. First, beginning in the late 1970s, every vine in every vineyard block was examined and categorized. Throughout the ’80s, grapes from similar vines were microvinified into tiny batches of wine for evaluation vintage after vintage. Meanwhile, the most promising selections were propagated and planted in blocks around the estate, with the same selections installed in different locations to see how they matched various soils and microclimates, a kind of sensory geographical focusing called zonation. A range of experimental rootstocks made the equation even more complex. And all the while, the tiny lots of wine produced by various selections in different locations were being continuously analyzed and compared on qualities such as berry size, tannin quality, acidity, color, and, of course, aroma and flavor.

When the vineyard dust began to clear a few years ago a kind of clonal dream team emerged. Although these aren’t necessarily the best and the brightest clones of the entire Montalcino district (other producers such as Biondi-Santi and Antinori have also conducted clonal refinement programs), they are the essence of its largest estate.

CLONE TASTE TEST
Considering that it takes three years for a newly planted vine to yield wine, the scope of the project seems gargantuan. Was it worth the effort? Perhaps the most significant aspect from a historical viewpoint is that several selections have been officially recognized as “Banfi clones” of Brunello, which eventually will be available to growers everywhere. Already, new vineyards in California and Australia have been planted to the Banfi clones. The more immediate rewards, of course, are resting in large oak puncheons deep in Banfi’s vaulted brick cellars.

While in Tuscany I tasted several single-clone wines with Banfi enologist Rudi Buratti. The tasting was especially fascinating because the grapes were grown in the same vineyard block and vinified identically, so that differences in the wines were due primarily to clonal expression.

The clones are intended to complement one another and diversify the scope of vineyard expression, but each makes a distinctive wine on its own. One (called Janus Tin 50) gave a rich and warm wine, with bright fruit and firm structure but soft, chewy tannin. Another (Janus 10) plumbed the depths of black fruit territory with lots of licorice and black cherry, and was remarkably focused and finely structured for such opulence — a noble, even heroic wine. A third clone (dubbed BF 30) was back in the red with a sweet cherry nose and silky weight on the palate. For comparison, we also tasted a wine made from R 23, the Brunello clone of Sangiovese, which is the most widely planted clone in the Brunello appellation. It had a fine aroma, ripe and lovely. Yet it was also considerably lighter in body and color than the others, with more strawberry-like fruit than others and a relatively simple, bright cherry finish.

Banfi’s current Brunellos are magnificent, especially the ’95 and ’97 Poggio all’Oro. Particularly impressive ’96 Brunellos included Il Poggione, Sesti, Pian delle Vigne (part of the Antinori empire), Verbena, Campogiovanni, La Poderina, and Col d’Orcia.

The work is moving more slowly in Montepulciano, but it is moving. Montepulciano is also warm and dry, and its Sangiovese is typically ripe and full-bodied. Until recently, many Montepulciano wines have been well on the rustic side, lacking the elegance of Chianti Classico and the structure of Brunello — but for sheer deliciosity they’ve long been some of my favorite Sangiovese table wines, especially during the grilling season.

The spring tastings demonstrated that the Montepulciano wines are becoming more distinctive and stylish as producers realize what a treasure they have in a bona fide appellation that has been underexploited. Intensive work with clones, trellising, and winemaking practice (particularly relating to tannin management) has been led by producers such as Avignonesi (a leader in the region’s clonal evaluations) and La Braccesca (another Antinori property). Redi, Poliziano, and Tenuta Trerose have joined in with sleek, bold, barrel-aged Nobile di Montepulcianos and lusty Rossos.

My tasting note for Fattoria del Cerro’s ’99 Rosso di Montepulciano is especially telling. In lieu of a meticulous description, I simply jotted down, “Buy case for summer — drink w/lamb.”

Rod Smith is wine columnist for the Los Angeles Times and recipient of the James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for magazine writing on spirits, wine, and beer.