May 2021. Just as the pandemic seemed to loosen its grip a little, we in the vineyard were fighting a perfect storm. The vintage was in danger of being lost like tears in the rain, Rutger Hauer would (perhaps) have said. The work we had done to keep the vines healthy was about to fade away under almost incessant rainfall. But in the best Scout spirit, we observed, deduced and acted, aware that it is never trivial to choose an urgent strategy when you would rather avoid shooting gnats with a bazooka.
In Ipplis, where we cultivate some of our vineyards, it rained 27% of the year's total. Two-thirds of the days in May were rainy and one-third overcast. 377 millimetres of water demanded that we do our utmost to monitor the effect of our interventions. In Montsclapade, the other hill in our care, 277 millimetres fell, 100 less than in Ipplis, which is only a few kilometres away as the crow flies.
Despite the growing (fortunately) sensitivity towards the environment, in the vineyard we are getting used to dealing with challenging climatic events. The rain that falls in Friuli today is not so different from that of previous years, but it is no longer distributed over time. There may be a month in which it rains a quarter of the year, and for us this means that we have to store the water and keep it in the soil so that it is available when we need it, to guarantee the plants the least possible stress.
Because the soil is in fact a sponge, we make sure that it does not dry out squeezed and thin like a rag and that, on the contrary, it is a soft, capillary and absorbent medium. We must therefore pay attention to soil compaction, mowing, grass cutting, green manure, i.e. the burying of special crops to maintain or increase the fertility of the soil and structure it. We also have to manage the plant's foliage (a bit like shaving and doing hair) where we may remove some leaves to expose the bunches to sunlight. But all practices suffer from unpredictability, let alone when the sky turns dark grey.
When Nature shows its muscles, you realize its dramatic beauty. Problems that you previously thought were big become small, and you realize that there is no point in waging war against it, that the way is to know it and live with it. And then, the uncertainty caused by the storm makes the craft of winemaking more fascinating. The thrill is always there, under the first drop. Anything can happen, and each year is its own story. If you think about it, wine is one of the few products for which you can talk about vintage, where you can only value what you harvest, nothing more.
If this had been our first vintage ever, we would have been in trouble. Being a winegrower is like a board game, with a few quirks: every round a few rules change and to win you have to guess which rules will change. Previous experience in this case is everything, you have to have the time to learn. If we were baking bread, technically we would have a lot of tests, but the truth is that winemakers only have one batch a year.
We began harvesting grapes in early September and finished just over a month later, as we did so long ago. We harvested the Pignolo on October 8, one day earlier than the 1895 harvest of the Casasola estate, the custodians of the oldest Pignolo vineyard.
Weexpect broad white wines. They will be rich, flavoursome, fragrant, with huge bouquets. They will have good acidity and be fat in the mouth, as well as warm. They will be a bit gourmet. The red wines will be affected by the general increase in temperature, but for the better. They will be very concentrated, long-lived and mature. When tasted, they will offer the pleasant astringent sensation of a nut, a pleasant dryness that is not unripe. They will be reds to drink, both vintage and cellar stock.
Like all of them, this vintage is not only the product of a vintage, but is also the result of choices you make from day "one, " the day you began to put your hand to the land and learn, especially from perfect storms. For us, that day was 1922.
