How to explain a wine produced by Montesecondo?
This is the first question I asked myself, in search of a stimulus that would alone enclose the articulated human, territorial and productive reality that characterize this winery.
After a while I realized that, as always, it was necessary to start from the man behind the name Montesecondo, Silvio Messana, a person with an articulate and rich in intellectual ideas life; a person from whom, as we will see, everything could be expected except the production of wines on average similar to those of the area in which he operates.
Silvio, born in Florence, spent his childhood and adolescence, up to the age of 18, between Libya and Tunisia, in areas where his family owned land and crops. When he came of age, Silvio enrolled at Berkley University in Boston to study music (mainly saxophone and composition). After the learning period, he moved to New York, where he alternated his work as a saxophonist with that of composer of soundtracks, and that of wine seller.
Silvio doesn’t know this, but we have much more in common than he thinks: I too studied music (among the various courses of study also composition) before moving to the world of wine, selling it in my former wine shop in Rome. It is at this point, however, that our lives take two different paths: I continue to study, and taste, wine, for communicative purposes, he decides to produce it in the family land in Cerbaia, near San Casciano in Val di Pesa, in 1999.
This land, in one of the most suitable areas of Chianti, has gradually expanded, to cover the current 17 hectares. Silvio’s approach starts from the need to make ecological both the work in the vineyard and the work in the cellar, and for this reason, already in 2003, he obtained the organic certification.
An aspect that I would define as “musical” in Silvio’s production, and that, even without this adjective, will make his fortune, is the choice of balance as a distinctive feature of all his wines; a decidedly contrary choice because they are years in which consumers are still looking for structured, round and wide wines. While the certification becomes biodynamic, Silvio refines its “touch”, making increasingly impalpable, almost a veil of silk, his wines, as in the case of Tin Rosso, a pure Sangiovese, which plays the role of flagship of the company.
“Tin” means clay in Arabic, and this quite exhaustively anticipates the productive characteristics of this wine. The grapes are those of a vineyard of 20 years of average age, planted with a density of 6500 vines per hectare. These, once arrived in the cellar, ferment spontaneously and macerate for a period ranging from 6 to 10 months, in clay amphorae (dolia).
Once drawn off, the wine ages for another 6-12 months, always in terracotta amphorae. Bottling without filtration or clarification precedes a period of aging in glass, before marketing.
The 2018 vintage shows a sparkling ruby color that never gives the idea of an excessive consistency, with a range of scents that opens on notes of pomegranate, cherry, red currant and red orange, followed by rosehip, pot pourri of aromatic herbs, Cowhide leather and vinyl, with final echoes of white incense, white musk and undergrowth.
The palate is an ideal stage where the much vaunted initial equilibria put in place an elegant ballet in which freshness, measured mineral sapidity and impalpable tannins are the undisputed étoiles; all while, by aftertaste way, return, with surgical precision, the scents perceived to the nose, which accompany the sip to a long and glittering closure like the Flower Waltz from Tchaikovsky “The Nutcracker”.
RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
PREZZO: €€
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