The vine years
Vine year 2010
From a meteorological point of view, we had constant temperatures in 2010, which were below the long-term average.
The harsh winter was followed by a cool, rainy spring. This resulted in late budding and flowering. Even in summer there was no great heat. Even August was rather cool and saw some rainfall. This weather pattern led to an extremely unproblematic ripening of the grapes in the Maremma, since the normal heat and water stress did not occur. In the Chianti area, we were very concerned whether our grapes would reach perfect ripeness before the usual autumn rainfall would set in. However, in September and October we had a perfect autumn. The weather was beautiful, almost summery during the day, while it was very fresh at night. The harvest started around 2 weeks later than normal. After the white grapes and the Merlot had been harvested, we stopped for another 10 days in order to achieve optimal ripeness for the remaining grape varieties.
On October 6th, all of our grapes were in the cellar. The result clearly exceeded all our expectations of the difficult vintage. Thanks to our intensive work in the vineyard and the perfect autumn, we were able to harvest ripe and healthy grapes. And the polyphenols were even exceptionally high.