Barone Ricasoli - Granello Vendemmia Tardiva 2003

Ricasoli is the oldest winery in Italy, the second oldest in the world according to the leading American magazine family business.
Today it is the largest winery in the Chianti Classico area: Brolio Castle, where Baron Bettino Ricasoli invented the Chianti formula in 1872, is surrounded by 1,200 hectares in the communes of Gaiole and Castelnuovo Berardenga. Valleys, hills, woods of oak and chestnut trees, 235 hectares of vineyards and 26 hectares of olive groves, all enjoying the beauty and the wide variety of soils and climate in this central Chianti area.
The nearby avant-garde cellars are where we undertake the same pursuit of excellence today that drove Bettino Ricasoli to invent the Chianti formula in 1872.
Francesco Ricasoli has been at the helm of the family business since 1993 and has renewed the quality and personality of great Brolio wines, experimenting and making the most of the unique characteristics of the land and its history. New labels are coming into existence and the already known wines, which have won awards all over the world, are being perfected: Barone Ricasoli's research continues and gives a whole new meaning to the culture of winemaking and the art of drinking.
Vineyards
In the middle of the 1990s, Barone Ricasoli started a huge project to renew the vineyards in its Chianti Classico land, amounting to 235.83 hectares. They were old vineyards (all planted at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s), ripped apart by Esca, with low densities per hectare and containing all the varieties belonging to Chianti Classico, but distributed randomly.
So an excellent opportunity arose to renew and improve the vineyards, while introducing international varieties, such as merlot and cabernet, at the same time. Considering that most of the land was made up of rock and that the breaking up of the land had to be done using ploughs and explosives, the problem of reclamation proved to be complicated and hard right from the start. So far 235 hectares have been replaced in Brolio, using modern preparation techniques and genetically selected material, all aimed at obtaining long-lived vineyards capable of producing high-quality grapes.
Plant spacing was based on high density and the number of vines varies from 5500 to 6600 per hectare. The training system is spurred cordon, 50 cm from the ground. There are 8 buds per plant and crop thinning enables a yield of about 1 kg of grapes per vine (65-70 quintals/ha). The white grape varieties, on the other hand, are guyot trained so as to exploit bud fertility to the full. The attention paid to the terroir, which influences Barone Ricasoli's decisions, is at the base of the zoning study set up in collaboration with the Experimental Institute for the Study and Protection of the Soil in Florence, which is going to classify every single vineyard according to its soil and climate characteristics: physical-chemical composition, altitude, exposure, microclimate. This study will help us to choose the most suitable variety to plant, the most suitable rootstock, the best row orientation and so on.
Varieties
Countless grape varieties have been studied and grown in Brolio for centuries, such as those that we refer to today as non native varieties, like merlot, chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon and many others, as well as an incredible array of sangiovese grapes, which through time have characterised, if we can say so, the DNA of Ricasoli wines. It is precisely this wealth of varieties, as a result of old studies gathered in the field, that Ricasoli has promoted a project of clonal selection in order to preserve the most interesting biotypes of sangiovese in Brolio. The clones selected have been used to make the most recent vineyards.
The Cellars
The cellars of Barone Ricasoli are at the foot of Brolio Castle, separated from the main body of the winery, and used exclusively for vinification purposes. The modernisation of the old cellars in Brolio was done by carefully restoring the aesthetic value and function of the original nineteenth century parts of the building, while organising modern and technologically avant-garde spaces at the same time.
The grapes are taken to the vat room in containers with a maximum capacity of 200 kg; vinification takes place in small steel vats, enabling us to carefully control the fermentation process and to keep all the characteristics of every single vineyard plot separate. Experiments and a thorough knowledge of the land have led us to vinify separately also within the same plot and according to the morphological similarities of the subsoil. The structure of the vinification vat room was devised so that the vats can be filled by means of gravity, which allows a gentle punching down so as to extract the noblest substances from the skins. At the end of the fermentation process the wines are transferred to barrels and oak barriques. The frequent organoleptic and laboratory controls accompany Ricasoli wines throughout their development right up to the long (sometimes very long) bottle maturation, in appropriate heat-controlled rooms, before being sent off to the four corners of the earth