Soldera IGT Sangiovese 2009

Why is this Wine so Yummy?

An article in The World of Fine Wine “Soldera: The Great Outsider” explores the estate’s history and philosophy in great depth and is worth a read.

You can also find out more about Soldera on their website.

In a nutshell, it comes down to a few simple things. Gianfranco’s vineyards are in a great spot, they are cared for with precision and the resultant fruit is of exceptional quality.

To age his wines for 5 years in a barrel is a testament to the quality of fruit. He places no limits on mentoring exceptional wine all the way to the bottle. He reminds of Dr Bailley Carrodus, Roberto Voerzio and other of the ilk.

The wines have incredible purity and harmony.

A GREAT WINE
You can tell a great wine by its harmony, elegance, complexity and naturalness.

This means balance and proportion, refinement and manifold sensation of aroma and taste. It means using mature, healthy grapes, transformed naturally into alcohol, following their natural process, with no chemical products or colouring added.

A great wine gives satisfaction, a sense of well-being, the desire to drink it again; it creates and increases conviviality and friendship. It is unique, rare, typical and long-lived. In it you can recognize its micro-territory, the vineyard it hails from. The wine from the Instistieti cru for example is different from the wine that comes from the Case Basse vineyard although no distance at all separates them.

A great wine cannot be substituted, because it has unique features, like any work of art. I sold not one bottle of  1989 vintage because I did consider it up to my usual high standards of quality.

A great wine is rare, the tip of the pyramid of around 20 billion bottles produced around the world every year. No more than 50 or 60 thousand of them will ever reach the top.

A great wine is long-lived: it must improve, at least in the first twenty years, and give different sensation as time passes. It is the only natural food product that has a longer life-span than a man’s.

All these features raise the production costs considerably – and the price – of a great wine. But any product which has similar worth is never going to come cheap. Beauty and excellence take time, experience and large investments.

I produce an average of 15 thousand bottles a year. But I drastically reduce that number if, because of bad weather condition during the season, the grape harvest is not up to scratch. Out of 30 vintages, 27 have been excellent: a record. The best of the lot, historic, is 1979’s.

Wine is however and always will be subjectivity: the same bottle can be worth 500 euros to one person and not even  1 euro to another.

Gianfranco Soldera