Poliziano

The Free Bacchus Story

Federico Carletti will tell you, without being pushed, that he spent his first decade making the wine too hard. He has said in print that for ten years he was overextracting — pulling too much colour and tannin out of the skins — and that the results were good but very strong. He also tried splitting the range into a first and second wine on the Bordeaux model and calls that a big mistake outright.

This is a producer at the top of his appellation describing his own errors in detail, which is worth more than any amount of heritage copy. His father Dino bought the land in 1961. Federico came back to it in 1980, and by 1983 had worked out that one parcel, Asinone, was different enough to keep separate. It has been bottled on its own ever since. He calls it his baby.

Montepulciano is a town in southern Tuscany, and this is the first thing to get straight because it trips up almost everyone: Vino Nobile di Montepulciano is made from Sangiovese, the grape of Chianti and Brunello, known locally as Prugnolo Gentile. It has nothing to do with the Montepulciano grape, which is grown in Abruzzo on the other side of the country and makes a completely different, darker, softer wine. Two famous names, one word, no relation.

Vino Nobile itself sits in the middle of the Sangiovese family — less austere than Brunello, more structured than most Chianti, built on sour cherry, tobacco and a firm grip of tannin that wants food.

The organic certificate is recent and it is thorough. Suolo e Salute holds it, it was read in TRACES this month, and it covers both properties — the estate at Montepulciano and Lohsa down in the Maremma — with no lines still in conversion. The row for this producer carried “unverified, pending registry check” for a month before that was resolved. It is resolved.