Winemaking at Brancaia
The techniques that ensure our commitment to the highest quality of our wines.
The basis for a top wine is laid in the vineyard. Nature is an essential force beyond our control. Our role is to understand it, respect it, and respond to it in the most thoughtful and effective way possible.
Barbara Widmer lives directly on the estate and regularly conducts several vineyard tours per week with agronomists Alessandro di Tardo and Marco Marchi. Together, they carefully monitor the vineyards to ensure that all tasks are perfectly aligned with the needs of the annual cycle.
Each individual vineyard parcel is hand-harvested and quickly brought to the winery for processing.
The grapes from Maremma are processed in our modern winery in Grosseto, while the grapes from Chianti (both from Castellina and Radda) are handled in our winery in Radda in Chianti.
Thanks to manual harvesting and the subsequent initial selection of the best grapes on the sorting table, we can ensure the highest grape quality right from the start.
Thanks to the multi-level structure of our winery, we can utilize gravity and largely avoid the use of pumps.
The fermentation takes place in temperature-controlled, conical stainless steel tanks. Thanks to their shape, the contact surface between the grape skins and the must is significantly larger, while the one between the air and the grape skins is reduced.
We have replaced the traditional pumping of the must with a modern plunger, thus eliminating the use of pumps in this process as well.
After fermentation, depending on the quality and wine type, Brancaia wines can age for 12-20 months in small wooden barrels, cement, or steel tanks.
In addition to the classic barriques (225 liters), 500-liter tonneaux are also used, which are particularly well-suited for Sangiovese.
In the cement tanks, the wines can breathe and develop a finer tannin structure, making these tanks particularly advantageous for fresher, younger wines.
We let the individual grape varieties vinify and ripen separately. The assembly takes place shortly before bottling. In this way we can perfectly do justice to the peculiarities of each individual location and optimally express their character.
The most important decisions in this central process are made by Barbara Widmer together with Fabrizio Benedetti and Amar Amarouche, the two cellar masters from Brancaia. You will be supported by the external oenologist Carlo Ferrini, who can look back on decades of experience.
The bottling takes place at the logistics center in Colle di Val d’Elsa, where the use of modern machines helps us bottle the carefully crafted product under optimal conditions.
After bottling, Brancaia wines remain in our warehouse, depending on the product, before being released to the market. This ensures they show a beautiful drinkability from the very beginning.
