IN THE WINE CELLAR…

Luano Bensi has been winemaker and consultant at Fattoria di Corsignano since the 2019 harvest, he arrived at the winery shortly after the 2018 vintage, with that year’s grapes already in the cellar.
“I know Corsignano very well because it is also the place where I grew up and still live, infact I enjoy the view of the Fattoria’s vineyards from the window of my house! Because of their terroir, Elena and Mario’s wines have great structure and concentration, a compulsory choice to support a Sangiovese that has to be harvested at an advanced stage of maturity. Because of the combination of climate and soil, there are significant concentrations of polyphenolic charge and important alcohol contents. This is why, in short, we decide to release the wine at least one year later than most of the neighbouring producers: to fully respect this peculiarity and enhance the time this wine can wait in the bottle.”
In more detail: vintage Chianti Classico needs more time than average for the tannins to soften and lose their rusticity without losing sight of the winery’s style, which calls for elegant and structured wines. These are wines with a long life because of their great freshness.
And the need for time to give the best is even greater if you move on to other grape varieties, such as the Malvasia Nera that Elena and Mario have decided to vinify in purity, in an experimental wine, produced by very few and still has to be fully discovered.
Wines intended for ageing undergo a long maceration on the skins, which allows more concentration, colour, structure and tannins, and are then aged in French oak barriques. Corsignano’s Sangiovese enhances its peculiar characteristics with a passage in wood, without being overwhelmed by it. For its ageing, we decided to use wood of different sizes, 20 and 10 hl barrels (which give different nuances to the wine) and 5 hl French tonneaux, the optimal size to enhance the product in a decisive way but respectful of the material.
From 2019, apart from investing in new wood, we have decided to proceed with a softer crushing of the grapes and to introduce a micro-oxygenation system in the cellar that will make some wines (not all) more ready, without rushing and without distorting the characteristic of Corsignano wines, which ability remains to cope splendidly with time, from the cellar to the bottle.