Vittorio Fiore and the emergence of Tuscany

Wines & Vines,  March, 2000  by Jordan Ross,  Beppe Filipetti

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Q5: When you say winery technology, what are you referring to?

I tried to change the old mentality which involved concrete tanks which made it impossible to obtain the optimal extraction of color and tannins from the skins of the red grapes. We introduced new, larger diameter tanks and mechanical systems to move the skins during the fermentation. Sangiovese, like Nebbiolo and Pinot noir is very different from Cabernet or Merlot in that it is more difficult to extract tannin and color. Another factor is the kind of wood. Aging in newer barriques results in better color. If you put the same wine in a barrique and a stainless steel tank, after six months you don't recognize them as the same wine. The two wines are completely different, in the taste as well as the color. Because the wood has this property to increase the color, obviously to give another taste of course because of the character of the wood.

Q6: What do you mean by the renovation of Italian viticulture?

When I started in Tuscany around the end of the '70s, I realized that the great handicap of the vitiviniculture of this region was the vineyard. The plantation system was not correct because it did not fully utilize the soil, too few plants per hectare so each plant had to work too hard. At Carparzo, Borgo Scopeto, Terrabianca, Fattoria Zerbina, Montefili, Sorbaiano and in many other wineries we utilized different clones and rootstocks and increased the number of plants per hectare to better utilize the soil. We had a quality result because each plant works less and so works better.

Q7: What factors inspired the change of focus in Italy from quantity to quality?

At the beginning of the '70s there were many things contributing to change in Italy. One was the press--we had Luigi Veronelli who waged a big fight against the old mentality to produce wine in Italy. Then we had people who invested a lot of money in the vineyards. The new mentality included the use of technicians, enologists to be responsible for the quality. In the past one man was responsible for the entire farm--olive oil, wine, wheat, cows. With the new mentality people were buying the farms as investments with the primary focus of producing a high quality wine; and for that they asked the enologists to be responsible for the quality.

Q8: Tuscany and Umbria in particular appear to be producing new wines from new grapes faster than any other region. Why?

Yes, it is definitely true. After WWII, the owners of big properties, noble families from Tuscany--Frescobaldi, Antinori for instance--started to sell pieces of their property because they needed money to survive. So a big property like Brolio--5,000 hectares (1 ha = 2.47 acres)--became a smaller property creating ten or fifteen other properties such as San Guisto di Rentanano and Felsina. So in Tuscany, at the end of the 1960s the farm in Tuscany cost nothing. Those who had bought these properties were people with good ideas, people from industry They didn't make the wine themselves they asked a winemaker, they asked me for instance. They said, "OK Mr. Fiore you have to produce the best wine possible on this farm, what do you need to do that?" I said I need such and such, the market will ask for this kind of wine, if everything goes well in five or seven years, we will have a return. In the majority of cases it was so.