Since the 2022 wines finished fermenting in October of that year, and I first tasted them, they have seemed different. As always, the grapes were destemmed and put into small tanks; during fermentation, the sugar in the grapes was consumed by the yeast on the skins and turned into alcohol. Then the wines were racked off the skins, the skins pressed and that juice, too, was added to the tanks.

Most of the 2022 grapes came from a vineyard 500 meters (1600 feet) high, in the north of Chianti Classico, in the province of Florence. Some of the vines were old—forty years or so—and the terrain was pure sandstone, a soil for which I did not have the highest regard. Just the idea of sandstone sounds silly to me, like making wine on a beach. Limestone is my favorite soil for growing wine grapes, preferably limestone that’s hundreds of millions of years old and from which those tangy, tensile Burgundian reds I love emerge.

The grapes were in questionable shape by harvest time, too. They were nicely ripe and still “croccanti,” juicy with thin but taut skins and seeds that had “woodened,” leaving no trace of greenness. Yet, a pest called “tignoletta” had ravaged the bunches, nesting in the center of each, eating grape flesh and building a webby nest that we had to pluck out of each bunch by hand. We harvested painstakingly slowly, and, to make matters worse, the farmer from whom I was buying the grapes (priced by the kilo) trailed behind us, throwing the bunches we had discarded back into our crates. I finally just let him do it, planning to chuck the reject bunches out again once I got everything back to the winery.

The grapes were costing a fortune, too, my having convinced the farmer, who normally sold to the local consortium, to sell to me by offering double the market price. On the long drive home (the vineyard was an hour away), I started to wonder if it had been worth it.

Cut to a few weeks later: the fermentations were finished, the wines were in barrels and the first samples had been sent off to both the lab (to get an idea of the basic parameters of the wine—alcohol, pH, acidity, etc.) and to a few trusted tasters for a first opinion.

“C’est intéressant,” said my friend, an oenologist in Beaune, “Ce terroir a quelque chose.” The wine was interesting, the vineyard had something. “Equilibré,” he summarised. Balanced. So rare was it to hear a note of envy in a Burgundian voice discussing wine that I was immediately pleased, but what was the value of his comment about balance?

I had not been striving for balance. I wanted my wines to stand out. I wanted to hear hyperbole when they were discussed: “The best Sangioveses! The truest wines to their terroir! The wines with the finest texture!” Balance sounded boring, mediocre even. But, as the 2022 wines have taught me over the past year, it turns out that balance is everything—a winemaking sine qua none.

Young red wines, like the Fanciulle 2022s that my friend in Beaune tasted, can be more acidic than the ones we are used to drinking before they undergo the second, or malolactic, fermentation, the one that turns malic acid (think of the tanginess of a Granny Smith apple) into lactic acid (think of the creaminess of milk). Often, the acidity of these young wines overwhelms their other characteristics. This was not the case with my 2022s.

Young wines can also have a rough texture if the grape varietal is rich in tannins. These tannins will smooth out (polymerize) during cellar aging, but if the tannins in the grape skins and in the grape seeds were not ripe when the grapes were picked, they will impart a green or vegetal taste to the wine, which cellar aging will do little to remove. Similarly, tannins with an unpleasant, drying/parching effect will never soften up: either the climate was too harsh for the grapes (and the tannins “burnt” before they ripened) or too much tannin was extracted because the grapes were overworked during fermentation. My 2022s had none of these problems, either.

Being too high in alcohol can also skew our enjoyment of a wine whatever its age. Not only does one want a dense, silky texture and a cleansing (but not searing) acidity, one wants to be able to distinguish the myriad fruity flavors—not lose them in the heat of an alcoholic swig. In order to appreciate aromas and flavors, the alcohol must be restrained, and it was in my 2022 wines (13,5%).

To have, as a young wine, a perceptible balance among texture, acidity, natural sweetness and alcohol is very promising indeed, because it is onto this solid structure—the wine’s bones, as it were—that all the delectable perfumes and flavors come to be layered—perfumes and flavors that would be masked if the texture were rough, the acidity too strong, the wine too alcoholic. It turns out that without balance, we cannot begin to appreciate the rest of a wine’s qualities. “Equilibré” was no faint praise.

I knew that the 2022s’ promising start could not have been the result of excellent farming—I had seen the condition of the grapes for myself. Nor was it the result of some special winemaking technique—I use the same approach in the cellar for all my wines, yet these stood out. The only explanation was the land—a high, steep, reddish-brown sandstone hill on the western side of a geologic formation that runs from the southeast of Florence to Gaiole.

The Fanciulle project was designed to demonstrate exactly what the 2022s were proving, namely, that the role of the land was much more powerful in terms of its impact on the character of the wine than was the growing season, the winemaker’s hand or the grape varietal itself. It is the greatness of that parcel of land that I appreciate now when I taste the 2022s—the extraordinary capacity of that hillside to procure for the vines the nutrients needed to ripen the grapes, such that the wine made from them is all that Sangiovese can be: floral, fruity, tangy, light on its feet, tantalisingly complex and persistent, deeply satisfying to drink—in short, excellent company, as the best wines always are. As a wine importer said to me the other day, “Terroir is everything—no, it’s the only thing.”