2021, the year of the frost: what the glass tells
Low yields, small grapes, a taut Sangiovese that will age for a long time. How a difficult year becomes a great wine.
2021 is the vintage that best explains what "difficult harvest, great wine" means. It began badly, with the frost of the night between 7 and 8 April that hit half of Tuscany when the vines had already budded: in the lower plots we lost part of the shoots, and with them part of the crop.
The season
Then came a dry, bright summer without excesses, with the Tyrrhenian breezes doing their work every afternoon as they do here. A cool September, with the swing between day and night that Sangiovese needs to build perfume and acidity. We harvested from 20 September to 5 October: small berries, thick skins, low yields. In the cellar, little wine and all of it good.
In the glass today
The 2021 Chianti Classico is a taut wine: dense ruby colour, a nose of crisp cherry, violet and a thread of dried herbs, a vertical palate with a fine, insistent tannin that asks for the table. It is not a soft vintage; it is a precise one. With pici in white ragù or a bistecca it opens at once; on its own it needs an hour in the glass.
In ten years
Vintages with little fruit and great concentration are the ones that age best, and 2021 has everything: acidity, tannin, substance. In the vintage archive we gave it our highest ageing potential. The 2021 Riserva, when it is released, will be a wine to set aside; the Chianti Classico we will drink with pleasure for six or seven years, and with surprise after that.
Why we tell it
Because wine changes and its identity remains. Every vintage is a different reading of the same place, and the frost of 2021 is as much part of the wine as the galestro. Anyone who wants to compare it with the others will find every vintage in the archive, and in the cellar the vertical tasting puts them side by side.