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| SETTE PONTI CROGNOLO Origin: Rosso IGT Toscana Colli Aretini Vintage 2000 Price $35 U.S. Release June, 2002 Grapes 90% sangiovese 10% merlot Average vine age: 25-35 years Yields 45-50 hectoliters per hectare (202-225 cases per acre). Taste: The wine's dense color suggests a concentration confirmed on the palate, along with sweet ripe flavors of wild cherries, black fruit, leather and vanilla also evident in the aromas. It is a refined, elegantly stylish wine with fruit forward lushness. It is firmly structured yet elegant, with good tannic support and well-integrated oak notes, leaving an overall impression of harmony, balance and length. Viticulture: Green harvest, at the end of July, reduced vine load to 1 or 2 bunches per cane. Harvest, following a very dry growing season that produced an excellent year with intense wines, began in mid-September for merlot and the end of September for sangiovese and cabernet sauvignon. The grapes were severely sorted at harvest, when they were picked individually by vineyard and exclusively by hand, with two-to- three passes through each vineyard for highly selective picking, with grapes from the third pass sold to other vintners. Vinification: Moretti prefers to blend sangiovese with merlot for weight and body rather than cabernet sauvignon for structure, as is typically the case with super-Tuscans. He has found, too, that merlot performs well in this cooler part of Tuscany. Each vineyard, variety and pass is handled individually, from de-stemming through fermentation, with special yeasts, 50% in 85-hectoliter stainless steel fermentors and 50% in 200 hectoliter glass-lined cement fermentors. The wines are fermented on their skins for 15 days and another 5 days off the skins, with manual punching down of the cap daily followed by complete natural malolactic fermentation. The wines are racked and then blended. Crognolo 2000 was aged 20 months in 225-liter medium-toast Allier barrels and 500-litre casks, the historic traditional size of Tuscany. The effect of each is quite different, with the larger wood producing softer, more mellow wines while small barrels produce wine with more structure. The two are blended to produce a harmonious whole. The wines were then racked, blended again, and aged a year in bottle prior to release from the winery. 13% alcohol, total acidity 5.2 grams/liter, pH 3.6; total production, 3,333 9-liter cases, packed in six-bottle cartons. History: This is the third vintage of Crognolo, named after a wild bush, Cornus in Latin, that grows on the historic Sette Ponti estate. The Moretti family has produced wine on their property in Tuscany’s Colli Aretini in the Valdarno (the valley of the Arno) in Chianti since 1957. The wine was sold in bulk until 1996 when Antonio Fioravante Moretti, an Italian business magnate, followed his passion and decided to bottle his own wines. Moretti’s first wine was Sette Ponti 1998 Crognolo, followed by the 1999 and 2000 vintages, and the 1999 Oreno. In this short time, he has made a reputation for creating exciting super-Tuscan wines that are, in the process, redefining the wines of the Colli Aretini. |
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