The Best Sangiovese May Be A Forgotten One

Alessandro came to the vineyard barefoot and walked up and down the rows of decades-old vines with me, tasting grapes, munching and then spitting out the skin. It was mid-September, a few days before the harvest, and we were trying to decide which vines to clone.

Over the course of the prior months, I had mapped the thousand or so vines growing on that plot, giving each gnarled trunk a number and letter based on its phenotype. There were classic-looking Sangioveses, with glossy, bright green lobed leaves, their bunches dangling in the form of a G clef, as well as atypical ones, small, oval clusters of black-blue grapes recognizable as Sangiovese only by the tell-tale sweet-and-sour taste, a harbinger of the mouthwatering finish common in the best Sangiovese wines. Tasting grapes from vine after vine along the row, the best stood out—grapes with intensity, depth and precision of flavor. Alessandro’s family nursery in northern Italy has been producing young grape vines for wine estates all over Europe for three generations.

“Hmm,” he mused, wide-eyed. “Fascinating. Taste this one.”

Vines are propagated not from grape seeds but from cuttings: the seed would produce a vine genetically different from the vine that bore it, whereas cuttings give rise to a vine with an identical genome to its “parent”—a clone. Most vineyards today are planted with proven grape clones, clones that have been selected over the years for higher yields or more resistance to disease, or because they flower later or ripen earlier, so that estates lose less production to spring frosts or autumn rain. A handful of Sangiovese clones such as RL24 and CCL2003 make up a large proportion of all Sangiovese grown in Tuscany today. But those clones weren’t around in 1946, when my vineyard was planted. The Sangioveses we tasted that afternoon offered a wealth of different sensations, sweet, savory, persistent, or downright flat and dry. Alessandro didn’t recognize among my vines any known clones. What were these strange and beautiful Sangioveses? What gave the grapes such distinctive tastes?

I called viticulturalists and other nurseries serving the wine sector to learn more. “Which clones produce better flavor?” I asked.

“The quality wineries use F9A548 or CCL 2000/4,” I was told by one nursery, and “Agri45 and CCL 2000/3 perform best,” by another. Yet another recommended clones they had developed in house, which offered “medium yields and high quality.” The answers were always the same: higher yields, looser bunches, better disease resistance. But what of the origins of the fascinating flavor variations I had tasted in my vineyard? Could these expressive Sangioveses be attributed to some older, now barely-known clones?

I did not get much further with my queries—could not find a connection between clone and, say, more perfumed grapes or grapes with more acidity. I wanted a more nuanced discussion, but I kept being led back to the goals of healthy, ripe grapes. Ironically, I’ve been arguing for the primacy of this consideration for years.

If grapes are under- or overripe, they will not express much of anything. Expression—of terroir, of vintage, etc.–emerges when grapes are harvested at the peak of ripeness. Said otherwise, ripeness is the sine qua none for expression. Without it, grapes say very little. With it, expression begins. Clones that resist pests and disease more effectively are more likely to bear healthy, fully ripened grapes.

I tied bows made from strips of old sheets around the vines the grapes of which Alessandro and I liked best—two dozen Sangiovese plants that seemed to us to have grapes with more concentrated and varied flavor. When we pruned the following winter, I gathered the cuttings from those vines, labelled each bunch according to the vine the cuttings had came from and sent them to Alessandro’s nursery for reproduction. Now, a year later, Alessandro has brought me the clones, 30 or forty from each bunch of cuttings, reproduced and grafted onto the rootstock we deemed best for the type of soil I have–new, old vines, that I’m busy planting with the two-pronged “forca” of old. In this way, the rare flavors in the grapes produced by my 1946 vineyard will be part not only of today’s Fanciulle wines but of tomorrow’s.