Monty’s Tuscan Red

Winewriter Monty Waldin on his latest venture – Monty’s Tuscan Red 2009.

Why produce a Tuscan red, having had such success with the French range of wines?

The simple answer is that my 18-month old son Arthur is at nursery school in Tuscany, and I am the one who takes him to nursery every day, having first dropped his Italian mum Silvana off at the railway station. Getting to Roussillon from Italy takes me longer (and costs more) than flying to New York. As I’d much rather spend time with my son than travelling it made sense to start a wine project in Tuscany.

I first came to Tuscany at the end of 2004 to do a crash course in Italian because I had been asked to write a travel guide called Discovering Wine Country – Tuscany (Mitchell Beazley, 2005). Although my Italian is still pretty poor (I speak English in front of Arthur, while Silvana whose English is almost better then mine speaks Italian), at least the book did pretty well.

The one thing I learnt during my time in Tuscany was that Tuscany’s main red grape, Sangiovese, can work as a single varietal in a red wine (ie “100% Sangiovese”) but rarely does so to brilliant effect.

Brunello di Montalcino, one of Italy’s most famous red wines, is supposed to be 100% Sangiovese (Brunello by the way is another name for Sangiovese), but quite a few wine critics and Italy’s investigating magistrates (who are questioning a host of Brunello wineries about their 2004 wines) are not so convinced that the “100% Sangiovese-only” rule is always being obeyed.

The problem with Sangiovese is it can have brittle tannins, aggressive acidity but only moderately intense fruit flavours. I say can, because if you grow Sangiovese in the right way you’ll find that it can start to become a little like Pinot Noir, showing ethereal red fruit flavours with an intense rather than weighty mouthfeel (which I like because it means you don’t get tired out after drinking just a single glass). Sangiovese rarely has much depth of colour and will always have a certain crispness to it which means you really only get the best out of it while drinking it with food (like the Italians do).

So, how do you grow Sangiovese “right”?

The thing that bowled me over when I was visiting the Tuscan vineyards during my book research was how maniacally Tuscan growers ploughed the soil between the vine rows. They seemed to live on their tractors. The main reason for this I discovered was that Tuscany is such a tourist hot spot, and as most Tuscan wineries have agriturismos or holiday accommodation which provide vital funds, the winery owners want to keep the tourists happy. As they think tourists want to see vineyards with a “weed-free” look they plough or chemically weedkill any and every weed in sight with a quasi-religious fervour (Tuscan vineyards are among Italy’s heaviest users of weedkillers).

Nothing wrong with that you may say, and from an aesthetic perspective you might be right. But as Tuscan soils are generally pretty heavy marine deposits (50-150 million years old, Tuscany once being the sea floor) the worst thing you can do is to keep churning them up to remove weeds. Ploughing initially can have a beneficial effect, aerating the heavy soils allowing rain water to penetrate so the vines don’t get stressed in the heat of summer. Heat-stressed Sangiovese produces especially anaemic wines. However, constant ploughing soon starts to have the reverse effect, leading to soil compaction. This is because worms and other soil organisms get fed up of being churned around by tractor ploughs, and it’s these organisms which keep soils healthy and friable by making tiny air pockets or galleries, to give otherwise heavy, impenetrable soils the necessary airy lightness to cope with extremes of heat and rain.

So, the more you plough, the more you compact because you literally pound the life and air out of the soil. The soil then becomes more acid, making it harder for vine roots to get the soil minerals they need to produce healthy grapes. Taking the weeds away also removes a food source for beneficial insects – pollen and nectar – above ground; and below ground remove a food source from the worms, because weeds release food into the soil via microbes living on their roots. This is the so-called soil food web. Weedkillers and excess ploughing destroy the soil food web. The result is minerally-deficient vines more open to insect attack.

So, you don’t need to be a mind-reader to work out that the only kind of Tuscan Sangiovese vineyard that I’d be interested in working with would have lots of weeds and no weedkillers. There are two types of weeds: weeds which grow naturally and weeds you choose yourself. The latter type are called cover crops. Cover cropping is simply sowing a mix of seeds on the soil to cover the bare soil with greenery (thus cover crops are also called green manures). The advantage of sowing your own is you can chose different cover crops for different situations. On Tuscany’s tough soils it makes sense to sow a mix of grasses and clovers. The grasses produce fine rootlets in the topsoil which prevent erosion whilst clovers provide nitrogen for the soil microorganisms who then pass it to vine roots. Clovers also produce flowers which provide food for beneficial insects.

One of the first Tuscan vineyards I visited during my book research was Stefano Grandi’s Canneta in San Gimignano. This is one of Tuscany’s oldest certified organic vineyards. My car was very low on fuel but I was so keen not to be late for my appointment with him – on a Sunday morning – I decided to risk it and fill up after my tasting apointment. Of course I ended up running out of fuel at the bottom of Grandi’s drive – which is very steep and over a mile long. Luckily, Stefano came to fetch me on his tractor with a jerry can of fuel for my car. “No one turns up on time in Italy,” he said. “It’s polite to be a little bit late. You’re so English!”

I’d first met Stefano at Millésime Bio, the world’s biggest organic wine fair, in 1999 and really liked his San Gimignano whites (from the Vernaccia grape) and Tuscan/Chianti reds. The wines were clean, refreshing, and with zippy, elegant, clear fruit flavours. Stefano came to Tuscany in the late 1970s having worked as a teacher and in farming. “I was into the whole hippy thing,” he says, “but one day you wake up and realise you’ve got to get a job and do some work.” He and his partner Valeria bought the run-down estate of Canneta, and set about renovating and extending the exisiting vineyards and converting outbuildings into a small winery.

What makes Canneta extra special for me is that every single one of the surrounding vineyards in the valley have followed Stefano’s lead and are now certified organic. There is thus no risk of chemical spray drift from non-organic vineyards. Stefano knows and informally advises some of his neighbours on organics, which makes sense for everyone. Organics is all about prevention rather than cure, so if farmers start talking to each other rather than always competing with each other warnings about possible pest attacks can be passed on and acted upon, reducing the need to spray, and therefore reducing costs both for the planet and for wine drinkers.

As far as winemaking goes the key with Sangiovese is not to push it too hard. If you ferment too hot, and extract too much, you’ll end up with a sexy-looking deepish coloured wine which may appeal to the dumber wine critics for whom everything must be “blockbustery” but one which risks being out of balance by being too powerful, and too tannic. The Sangiovese grape has notably tannic pips (seeds) and as these go into the fermenting vats along with the juice and the grape skins, pushing the fermentation too hard means these potentially aggressive seed flavours will end up in the wine. Easing off gives you more, for less.

The 2009 vintage was a good one in San Gimignano – rain at the right time in spring, plenty of summer sun, coolish nights at harvest – but by easing off on the extraction the result is a wine which is ready to drink now and over the next three (even five) years. Also, by picking the grapes at perfect ripeness and not over-extracting there is no need to fine the wine (using egg white or casein or other animal by-products) to smooth over rough edges. The BBC’s “Really Disgusting Food” team were here last week filming me taking to presenter Alex Riley about winemaking additives, aids and agents. As things stand winemakers do not have to list what they use during winemaking. Using no fining agents means Monty’s Tuscan Red is suitable for vegans (and therefore by implication for vegetarians too).

Blending in 30% Merlot is another way of rounding out the Sangiovese. Merlot at its best has lush red fruit and a fuller body than Sangiovese, so they work well as a pair. I have been a consistent critic of Merlot in Tuscany because invariably Merlot gets planted on really hot sites where it produces really fat, doughnut wines: wines with a hole in the middle. I have never had a decent Merlot from the Maremma (Tuscany’s Mediterranean coast) for example where soils are sandy, free draining and too hot for this grape. And Maremma Merlots are some of Tuscany’s most highly priced wines. The power of Merlot, I guess.

In San Gimignano, however, there is plenty of the kind of water-retaining clay that Merlot likes (Pomerol in Bordeaux is a clay-rich soil, for example). I also think that if you are going to blend Sangiovese with Merlot (or other French grapes) in Tuscnay you should be open about it and say so on the label. Plenty of Italian wines – Chianti for example – are allowed French grapes but you’d never know this from the label.

In Brunello di Montalcino (where, to repeat, Merlot or any grape other than Sangiovese is not allowed) for example the suspicion is that Merlot has sometimes been blended in to “sex up” the Sangiovese but as this is against the rules no one who did such a thing would be foolish enough to say so on the label. In San Gimignano however Merlot is allowed. In fact Monty’s Tuscan Red could essentially have been labelled either as a Chianti or as a San Gimignano Rosso (as opposed to Vernaccia di San Gimignano, the town’s world famous dry, brisk white wine) but I chose to label the wine simply as “Tuscan” because I think San Gimignano Red is too confusing for San Gimignano’s white wine fans, and Chianti is just too chaotic – there are around 20 types of Chianti according to the rules if you could be bothered to count all the sub-regions and riserva denominations permitted; the rules are badly written and badly policed because there are so many factions in Chianti fighting for control; and consumers are confused because Chianti can be both one of the cheapest supermarket wines you are likely to find and one of the most expensive in a good wine shop. What is Chianti? The answer is no one really knows. So, Tuscan Red it is.

Monty Waldin